CUNY Stella and Charles Guttman Community College

Situated at 50 West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan, Guttman's campus life is urban and centrally located. The college is committed to embracing and celebrating its vibrant cultural and ethnic diversity. Student Life is an active department, with a dedicated office (Room 004) and an official Instagram presence (@guttman.studentlife) that showcases events, library activities, and community gatherings using tags like #thisiswhatguttmanlookslike. The atmosphere is built around creating a cohesive, supportive community for a student body that totals around 978 students, making it a relatively intimate environment within the vast CUNY system. While it is a commuter campus without traditional residential housing, the college fosters engagement through organized activities and a focus on building a shared identity among its students.

Outcomes are the central metric by which Guttman measures its success, and they are notably strong for a community college. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the college's three-year graduation rates consistently hovered around 40%, which it notes is more than twice the 15% national average for public urban community colleges. More recent data from IPEDS reports a six-year graduation rate of 23%, though context is important as the college emphasizes shorter, three-year completion timelines for its associate degrees. Earnings data is limited, but one source estimates earnings one year after graduation at $21,190. The fundamental outcome story is about completion: Guttman was built from scratch to dramatically improve graduation rates, and its historical performance indicates it has succeeded in that mission relative to its peers.

Affordability is a cornerstone of the Guttman mission. The average net price after aid is $5,833. A significant majority of students receive substantial grant aid that makes attendance possible. Over 60% of full-time Guttman students attend tuition-free thanks to federal Pell Grants, New York State's Tuition Assistance Program (TAP), or the CUNY Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP). More granular data shows that 78% of students receive federal grants (averaging $5,503), 66% receive state/local grants (averaging $2,530), and 89% of enrolled students receive grants or scholarships overall. The college encourages all students to use the CUNY Net Price Calculator and work with the financial aid office to cover costs. While not a "no-loan" institution in the elite university sense, its aid packaging heavily emphasizes grants, with only 2% of students taking out loans.

Guttman stands out as a purposeful, evidence-based redesign of the community college itself. It is not an incremental reform of an existing institution but a clean-slate experiment launched in 2012 with the explicit goal of solving the community college completion crisis. Its distinctiveness lies in several integrated features: a mandatory, integrated first-year experience that eliminates standalone remedial courses; a small, curated set of career-focused academic programs; an intensive support structure; and an urban campus in the heart of New York City. This cohesive design has produced results, earning it recognition as the #1 community college in New York State. It is a college for students who seek a structured, supportive, and direct path from open admission to an associate degree and the workforce, all within a model built to defy the statistical odds that traditionally plague urban community colleges.