College Graduation Rates PLUNGE for 5 Years

September 28, 2026

College students walking on campus with books and backpacks — Photo: Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock

A university system that spent nearly a decade proving it could move low-income students to a degree faster and more reliably than almost any public system in the country is now watching several of its core completion metrics slide backward for five straight years, and the retreat is broad enough to touch both its two-year and four-year campuses.

Key Points

CUNY’s six-year associate-degree graduation rate fell from 39.8 percent in Fiscal 2023 to 37.6 percent in Fiscal 2024 and 36.5 percent in Fiscal 2025.
The six-year baccalaureate graduation rate dropped from 61.9 percent in Fiscal 2023 to 60.0 percent in Fiscal 2024 and 57.9 percent in Fiscal 2025.
City officials attribute the decline largely to lingering disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic on the affected student cohorts.
Even CUNY’s flagship completion program, ASAP, saw its three-year graduation rate slip from 39.4 percent to 36.2 percent before partially recovering to 38.5 percent.
The pattern reflects a familiar two-front problem in urban public higher education: weaker student preparation entering the system and strained institutional capacity to support students once enrolled.

The Numbers Behind the Decline

The City University of New York’s own performance data, published in the NYC Mayor’s Management Report, lays out the trend without ambiguity. Associate-degree completion, tracked on a six-year horizon, had actually been climbing for years — rising from 37.2 percent in Fiscal 2020 to a peak of 39.8 percent in Fiscal 2023 — before reversing course. It then fell to 37.6 percent in Fiscal 2024 and 36.5 percent in Fiscal 2025. Baccalaureate completion followed the same arc on a larger scale, dropping from 61.9 percent to 60.0 percent and then to 57.9 percent over the same two years. A nearly four-point drop in bachelor’s completion within two fiscal years is a material shift for a system that enrolls roughly a quarter-million degree-seeking students across its community colleges and senior colleges.

The city’s own report frames the decline cautiously, attributing it largely to “lingering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic” on the cohorts whose enrollment windows overlapped with campus closures, remote instruction, and the economic strain that followed. That is a plausible and partial explanation, not a complete one — six-year graduation cohorts include students who enrolled years before the pandemic hit, meaning the disruption alone cannot account for the full magnitude of the slide.

What a Six-Year Graduation Rate Actually Measures

CUNY calculates its system graduation rate as the share of a first-time, full-time entering cohort that earns a degree from any CUNY college within six years of enrollment, whether at the original campus or after transferring internally. That “system” framing matters: it credits the university for internal transfers rather than penalizing students who move between a community college and a senior college, which is a common and often strategic pathway for CUNY students balancing work, family, and coursework. It also means the metric is a lagging indicator — a student counted in the Fiscal 2025 cohort typically began coursework around 2019, so today’s rate reflects choices, supports, and disruptions from years earlier, not this semester’s conditions.

A Two-Pronged Explanation: Preparation and Capacity

Education analysts examining the slide describe it as a two-pronged problem, and the framing holds up against the data. One prong sits upstream, in New York City’s public school pipeline, where learning loss tied to pandemic-era remote instruction left many incoming CUNY students less prepared for college-level coursework than prior cohorts. The other prong sits inside CUNY itself: a system managing enrollment shifts, financial pressure, and student-support infrastructure that has not fully scaled back up to pre-pandemic staffing and advising capacity. Neither factor alone explains a decline of this size and duration; together they describe a system absorbing shocks from both ends simultaneously — weaker inputs arriving at the same time the institution’s own capacity to compensate was constrained.

The ASAP Counterexample: What Success Looks Like

The clearest evidence that CUNY’s completion problem is fixable, not fixed, comes from its own flagship intervention. CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, launched in 2007, was designed explicitly to close the completion gap through mandatory full-time enrollment, block scheduling, dedicated advisors, tuition gap coverage, and free MetroCards — a bundle of structural supports rather than a single fix. Independent, randomized evaluation by MDRC found ASAP nearly doubled three-year graduation rates relative to a matched comparison group, and a fourteen-year follow-up still showed a meaningful gap in ultimate degree completion between ASAP participants and non-participants. Yet even ASAP was not immune to the recent slide: its three-year systemwide rate fell from 39.4 percent to 36.2 percent before recovering to 38.5 percent. That a program built specifically to insulate students from exactly the kind of disruption CUNY has faced still dipped and only partially rebounded is telling — it suggests the pressure on completion was systemic enough to strain even the university’s best-designed defenses.

What the Decline Means Going Forward

CUNY’s completion numbers matter well beyond the university’s own accreditation filings. The system enrolls a disproportionate share of first-generation, low-income, and immigrant students for whom a CUNY degree is often the clearest available path to upward mobility in New York City, and outside evaluations have consistently shown that structured, well-resourced completion programs can move outcomes dramatically when funded and staffed properly. The five-year slide is a signal that the underlying supports — academic remediation, advising capacity, financial aid navigation — have not kept pace with what an academically less-prepared, pandemic-affected cohort actually needs. The partial rebound in ASAP’s numbers between Fiscal 2024 and Fiscal 2025 offers a modest but real data point: when a program is designed to absorb shocks, it can still recover faster than the system around it. Whether CUNY’s broader graduation rates follow that same recovery curve in the years ahead will depend less on any single fix than on whether the university can rebuild capacity on both ends of the pipeline at once.