2024 Reports

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

Scott-Clayton, Judith E.; Garfinkel, Irwin; Ananat, Elizabeth; Collyer, Sophie; Hartley, Robert Paul; Koutavas, Anastasia; Wang, Buyi; Wimer, Christopher T.

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, practice healthier behaviors, 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 working paper 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.” The authors find that net social benefits are large, even under their most conservative assumptions. They estimate net social benefits of nearly $43,000 per CUNY ACE participant, which are primarily driven by greater earnings of participants over their lifetime. When considering intergenerational benefits for children of ACE participants, that number nearly triples to $125,000 in 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.