The City University of New York has announced a $25 million gift from the Stella and Charles Guttman Foundation in support of the New Community College at CUNY and two other initiatives designed to boost student retention and graduation rates.

The gift includes $15 million to establish an endowment for NCC in support of its efforts to improve historically low graduation rates at community colleges and provide paid internships, scholarships, and emergency funds for low-income students. NCC opened last August with a goal of graduating at least half its students within three years based on CUNY's Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model, which uses block-scheduled courses, cohorts by major, small classes, a full-time study requirement, and comprehensive advisement and career development services to help motivated community college students earn their degrees quickly. In recognition of the largest gift ever made to a community college in New York State, NCC will be renamed the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College.

In addition, CUNY will use $9 million of the gift to establish the Guttman Transfer Scholarship Fund, which will work to boost the number of academically qualified low-income CUNY community college students who continue their education at senior colleges in the CUNY system. Selected from among students at all seven community colleges in the CUNY system, scholarship recipients will receive $2,000 a year for two years to complete a bachelor's degree. It is expected that the endowment will be able to fund more than two hundred scholarships annually within five years. The final $1 million of the gift will be used to expand the ASAP initiative — which has produced three-year graduation rates of 55 percent, compared with 23 percent for similar community college initiatives — to more than 4,050 students in 2014.

With the gift, the Guttman Foundation is directing half its current assets to the goal of improving the college success of New York City public school graduates. "The CUNY grant is the result of several years of research into how the foundation could best advance the cause of making a college education available to the largest possible number of highly motivated low-income public school graduates," said foundation president Ernest Rubenstein. "The foundation's board and staff are convinced that achieving that goal is critical to the future of our city, state and nation — and best honors the aspirations, values and memory of Charles and Stella Guttman."