CBA Educational Benefits Scarcely Known Within West Harlem, Community Members Say

Upper West Side NY

11 April, 2022

3:44 PM

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By Esther Sun, Columbia Daily Spectator BY ESTHER SUN • April 11, 2022, 4:53 AM On the northern side of the 125th Street subway station, shiny glass buildings rise up nine stories into the sky on the same blocks that used to house a slew of independent businesses and hundreds of affordable apartment units. Meanwhile, many West Harlem community members have yet to experience the educational benefits Columbia committed to offering the community when it first began to build the new campus. As Columbia finalized plans to construct its new 6.8 million square-foot campus in Manhattanville in 2009, the administration signed the Community Benefits Agreement with West Harlem leaders in an effort to ameliorate the drastic impact that the University's expansion would have on the neighborhood. The deal promised West Harlem residents $150 million worth of financial contributions to the area, including an affordable housing fund and a range of benefits relating to education, senior services, employment programs, and more. Thirteen years later, community members say that not enough West Harlem students or families even know about these opportunities—particularly the educational ones. "Some of the programs are there, and they should be accessible, but what happens is that they are not advertised," Deirdre McIntosh-Brown, co-chair of the Youth, Education and Libraries subcommittee of Community Board 9, said. "The information is not being distributed and disseminated throughout the community." Among the CBA youth educational benefits listed on Columbia's "Community Commitments" page of its "Neighbors" website are the creation of a public middle and high school for STEM subjects by the Columbia Secondary School, scholarship and internship programs for local students, and the Zuckerman Institute's Education Lab, which hosts programs for children about brain science. According to the agreement, most of the CBA educational programs are designed to expire 25 years after the CBA's commencement date, in 2034. The CBA itself expires in 2040, releasing Columbia from its obligations. "I've been looking at the [Thompson-Muñoz] scholarship program for quite a few years," Victor Edwards, vice chair of CB9, said. "It wasn't until we brought [it] to [Columbia's] attention or asked who are the recipients that they really started publicizing it by zip code and what schools the young people are coming from, but I still don't think they make a real effort to publicize it enough." As one of the CBA educational benefits, the Thompson-Muñoz Scholarship provides need-based undergraduate scholarships for up to 40 aid-eligible students per year who are from Harlem and gain admission to Columbia College or the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Since 2013, 333 scholarships have been awarded to students from Harlem, the Upper West Side, and the Bronx. However, Edwards noticed that a majority of the scholarship's recipients were students at New York City's elite high schools, whereas he believed there are students "at what we would call the 'average' high schools that are quite capable as well" but simply aren't aware of the Thompson-Muñoz scholarship. Indeed, most of the Thompson-Muñoz Scholars for the academic year 2020-2021 attended highly selective high schools scattered throughout the city—many of them specialized STEM or art schools—such as Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science, and LaGuardia High School. Some Thompson-Muñoz Scholarship recipients from the past five years even attended private out-of-state boarding schools, including Groton School in Massachusetts and Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. "I just think [Columbia] could do a better job," Edwards said regarding outreach to non-elite community schools. Overall, it appears that the West Harlem community has faced difficulties in reaping the benefits promised in the CBA. Beyond educational benefits, the Spectator found in 2018 that only one percent of the $10 million committed to affordable housing had been spent. Administrators at an educational enrichment nonprofit in West Harlem also raised concerns about the University's lack of publicity regarding the educational benefits in the CBA. "There [aren't] a lot of advertisements that speak about the opportunities that exist," Fern Khan, interim executive director of the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, said. As a supplemental educational program, HEAF currently serves 655 students from sixth grade to college, and has served many more since its inception in 1980. Its students have been admitted to prestigious institutions like Wellesley College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. None of the organization's previous or current students, however, attend Columbia. Neither Khan nor her colleague Natalie Baez, the Onward college program director at HEAF, had ever heard of the opportunities offered to local students by Columbia, including CBA benefits like the Thompson-Muñoz Scholarship and the internship program. Columbia sends emails to the community about the college fair that the admissions office holds on campus every year, though McIntosh-Brown said CB9 has rarely received such emails in an appropriate amount of time before the fair takes place. Furthermore, many of the Manhattan high schools that Columbia undergraduate admissions officers visit annually for local outreach efforts are either private schools or prestigious public schools located in affluent areas like the Upper East Side and Midtown Manhattan. Out of the 31 virtual visits Columbia admissions made in the 2020-2021 school year to Manhattan high schools, only four were located north of 96th Street. Beyond the lack of awareness in the community about these benefits, many of the benefits also come with limited scopes or financial barriers to community access that the "Community Commitments" webpage, the most public-facing resource that provides information on CBA benefits, fails to present upfront. On its list of benefits, the website includes community access to Columbia facilities such as libraries and campus resources and even access to faculty support and mentorship. In reality, this access is only available to Columbia Secondary School students, despite not being clearly presented as such on the website—and though relatively racially diverse compared to other elite New York City schools, CSS itself has also faced criticism for what some see as a failure to admit a student body that represents the district's socioeconomic and immigrant makeup. Furthermore, the Teachers College Community School, a public school for children in prekindergarten through eighth gradethat was created by the CBA to serve residents of CB9, requires parents to pay fees if they want to send their children to the afterschool program more than three days a week. The athletics clinics for community youth also require participants to pay fees, and the number of CB9 youth enrolled in these clinics was "extremely low," according to data tracked by CB9. When discussing the limited scope of the Thompson-Muñoz scholarship program, community members at a CB9 strategic planning meeting last November pointed out that perhaps the scholarship would have a greater impact on the community if, for example, it helped students from Harlem pay to attend any university, rather than just students admitted to Columbia. On a broader scale, concerns with publicity and accessibility rang true not just with the CBA's youth education benefits but also education benefits geared towards adults. The A'Lelia Bundles Community Scholars Program, for example, allows adults from Upper Manhattan to audit courses and access campus resources at Columbia. In the academic year 2020-2021, 66 percent of the participants in the Manhattanville Course Auditing and Lifelong Learners Program lived in the Upper West Side and parts of Morningside Heights, in the area ranging from 96th Street to 116th Street. Though the program website explicitly describes it as "available to the residents of the Manhattanville and Grant Houses, and the local Manhattanville community," none of the participants in 2020-21 lived in those two affordable housing developments. "I'm sure there are people in the community who would love to take a college class," McIntosh-Brown said, regarding the program, "but when we get that information, it's generally the day before the deadline or after the deadline [to apply]." In light of the lack of community awareness of CBA youth education benefits, Baez said one way that Columbia can better engage students in Harlem and make a Columbia education seem more possible to them is by partnering with local educational nonprofits like HEAF to offer student mentorship. For example, Baez suggested that Columbia could connect Harlem teens who are interested in certain majors to current Columbia students with that major, who would play the role of "a big sister or big brother" to the younger students. Though he underscored the importance of community members in spreading the word about CBA benefits, Edwards also pointed to several types of community organizations through which Columbia can send representatives or informational materials to engage West Harlem youth: local parent-teacher associations; tenant associations; and community centers with after-school programs, such as the Grant Houses Cornerstone Program located just three blocks north of Teacher's College. The necessary approach for Columbia's outreach, McIntosh-Brown said, is "definitely going out and going where the people—the children—are, rather than waiting for them to find out by word of mouth or from someone else." Staff writer Esther Sun can be contacted at Staff writer Esther Sun can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.