The Net Benefits of Raising Bachelor’s Degree Completion Through CUNY’s ACE Program

The Net Benefits of Raising Bachelor’s Degree Completion Through CUNY’s ACE Program

Bachelor’s degree (BA) attainment is one of the most reliable indicators of an individual’s future economic and social advantage. Four-year college graduates earn more, pay more in taxes, are healthier, and are more likely to vote and volunteer. Despite these documented benefits, gaps in BA attainment have widened over time, even as overall rates of attainment have increased.

In 2015, the City University of New York (CUNY) launched a new program—Accelerate, Complete, and Engage (ACE)—aimed at improving bachelor’s degree completion rates. A randomized-control evaluation of the program found a nearly 12 percentage point increase in graduation five years after college entry. Despite this compelling evidence, public funding for ACE is not a foregone conclusion. Programs like ACE may be disadvantaged during budget cycles, as policymakers weigh quantifiable up-front costs against unquantified future benefits.

This brief, and the working paper on which it is based, uses the ACE impact estimates, along with national data on earnings, to estimate the expected incremental long-run benefits and costs from CUNY ACE participation, as well as intergenerational benefits to the children of participants, relative to “business as usual”. We find that net social benefits are large, even under our most conservative assumptions. While our analysis is focused on CUNY ACE, our approach highlights the long-term value of both increasing and accelerating college completion more generally.

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    Read Working Paper

    Key Findings

    • We estimate net social benefits of nearly $43,000 per CUNY ACE participant, which are primarily driven by greater earnings of participants over their lifetime. 
       
    • Including intergenerational benefits for children of ACE participants, who grow up in higher-earning families, nearly triples our main estimate, to over $125,000 net social benefits per participant. 
       
    • These results may be larger or smaller depending upon whether ACE’s impact on graduation after five years persists indefinitely, or whether the control group eventually catches up—but net social benefits are strongly positive in all scenarios.

    Suggested Citation:

    Scott-Clayton, Judith, Irwin Garfinkel, Elizabeth Ananat, Sophie Collyer, Robert Paul Hartley, Anastasia Koutavas, Buyi Wang, and Christopher Wimer. The net benefits of raising bachelor’s degree completion through CUNY’s ACE Program. New York: Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University.

    Published on December 18, 2024