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Announcing plans to beef up funding for the city’s community colleges, Bloomberg billed himself as the first mayor to heed President Obama’s call for greater investment in higher education.

Part of that investment may come from the mayor himself. At a press conference today at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Bloomberg said that he expected most of the funding for a new community college he wants to open to come from private donations, adding that he would contribute some of his own money to the project.

His campaign plan includes flooding the city’s eight community colleges with an additional $50 million over the next four years as well as increasing the availability of existing programs, such as day care for students’ children and financial aid.

In July of this year, Obama announced a $12 billion plan to produce 5 million more community college graduates by 2020. The mayor’s plan states that it will graduate 120,000 New Yorkers by that year.

“New York City can and should lead the way in following the president’s challenge and we will,” the mayor said. (more…)

More city public school graduates are enrolling at City University of New York Colleges, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and CUNY President Matt Goldstein boasted at a press conference last month. But whether the students are prepared for the college experience, both in and outside the classroom, is much less clear.

Only 7.5% of students take all of the high school courses that CUNY recommends, and more than 70% of the first-year students in CUNY’s junior colleges must take remedial courses to catch up on basic skills, according to John Garvey, who was until recently the dean in charge of CUNY’s College Now program, which allows high school students to take college-level courses. Garvey presented the information at an event Tuesday held by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which is developing a set of recommendations for how to boost student achievement.

One major problem is that the most advanced high school courses, called Regents courses to match the exit exams students must pass, do not approximate the style or difficulty of college classes, Garvey said. CUNY freshmen are exempted from remedial courses if they score a 75 on the math and English Regents exams. But the tests focus on material that should be learned in middle school and the first years of high school, Garvey said. “They don’t align with the real needs of college courses,” he said. (more…)