Reform and Rigor in CUNY's Common Core

COVERSTORY
STREAMLINED
PATHWAYS
Reshaping the college route for today’s world — and tomorrow’s
By Ruth Landa
IT WAS FALL 2011, and Greg Bradford was looking
forward to graduating from Brooklyn College at
the end of the semester. Over a nine-year period,
he had studied at York College, then Borough of
Manhattan Community College and then
Brooklyn, where he believed he finally had the academic
credits he needed for his baccalaureate degree in
psychology.
Bradford’s story is not unusual at The City University of
New York, where each college has traditionally
set its own general education and
graduation requirements — deciding
which transfer credits to accept — even as
CUNY has developed, functioned and been
funded as an integrated university. As a
result, many students — particularly those
moving from CUNY’s community colleges
to its senior colleges — have had previously
earned credits rejected or downgraded
to elective credit at their receiving schools,
forcing them to expend more time, and
sometimes money, to graduate.
CUNY’s sweeping new reform of general
education will change all that. The initiative,
Pathways to Degree Completion,
will streamline general education requirements and transfers,
speed completion of required courses, and enhance
academic standards and transparency across the
University, where transfer students now account for more
than 50 percent of graduates at the senior colleges.
Innovative National Model
The heart of the Pathways reform is a new, Universitywide
Common Core curriculum that has been hailed by
renowned higher-education leaders as an innovative,
national model for large public universities. These academics
— current and former heads of higher education associations,
Ivy League leaders and prominent scholars — say the
new framework will raise standards, improve graduation
rates, increase efficiency and better serve CUNY’s exceptionally
diverse student body, and the city.
“The City University’s new Common Core curriculum is
nothing less than a triumph for higher education in the
United States,” asserted sociologist Jonathan Cole, John
Mitchell Mason Professor at Columbia University and its
former provost and dean of faculties. Cole, one of 12 educators
whose endorsements were cited in a 12-page CUNY
guide to the transformation, Pathways Ahead: Reform &
Rigor, said the reform achieves “what most
well-informed educators in large public universities
have been striving to achieve for
decades: a combination of access, opportunity
for social mobility through the ability to
transfer credit from one college in the system
to another, and academic excellence.”
The 30-credit Common Core, plus an additional
6 to 12 credits of College Option general
education credits for the senior colleges
(decided by the senior colleges) is to take
effect in fall 2013.
The 30-credit core, which is mandatory for
all undergraduates, consists of 10, three-credit
courses that can be combined in a variety of
ways by individual campuses, giving colleges
and students flexibility in designing their requirements and
course content. The 30 credits encompass a 12-credit
“required core” — six credits of English Composition, three
of Mathematical and Quantitative Reasoning, and three of
Life and Physical Sciences — and an 18-credit “flexible
core” of six, three-credit liberal arts courses, including at
least one connected with each of these thematic areas:
World Cultures and Global Issues, U.S. Experience in its
Diversity, Creative Expression, Individual and Society, and
Scientific World.
Specific Course Outcomes
Critical to the Pathways reform — and to enhancing academic
standards across the University — is the insistence
12 SPRING 2012