In a hurry to make up for his wasted prison years, McGee signed up. The pace, as he’d been warned, was fast from the start, and did not ease up after the fall. Through the spring semester and on into his second year, his course load remained heavy, and the advisory meetings continued, metronomically. He was encouraged to take winter- and summer-term classes, filling in the breaks between semesters. McGee, a guy with a stocky boxer’s build, doesn’t gush—he conveys low-key composure—but when I met him in October of 2012, early in his third year, he had only praise for the unremitting pushiness, and for the array of financial benefits that came along with it. The package was courtesy of a promising experimental initiative that goes by the snappy acronym ASAP, short for Accelerated Study in Associate Programs. Last winter, McGee graduated with an associate’s degree in multimedia studies. It had taken him two and a half years.

In the community-college world, McGee’s achievement is a shockingly rare feat, and the program that so intently encouraged him to accomplish it is a striking anomaly. The country’s low-cost sub-baccalaureate system—created a century ago to provide an open and affordable entry into higher education to an ever more diverse group of Americans—now enrolls 45 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, many of them part-time students. But only a fraction ever earn a degree, and hardly anyone does it quickly. The associate’s degree is nominally a two-year credential, and the system is proud of its transfer function, sending students onward to four-year schools, as juniors, to pursue a bachelor’s degree—the goal that 80 percent of entrants say they aspire to. Reality, however, typically confounds that tidy timeline. In urban community colleges like the Borough of Manhattan Community College, the national three-year graduation rate is 16 percent. Nationwide, barely more than a third of community-college enrollees emerge with a certificate or degree within six years.

Behind these dismal numbers lie the best of intentions. Community colleges have made it their mission to offer easy access, flexibility, and lots of options to a commuter population now dominated by “nontraditional” students. That’s a catchall label for the many people who don’t fit the classic profile of kids living in dorms, being financed by their parents. Nearly 70 percent of high-school graduates currently pursue some kind of postsecondary schooling, up from half in 1980. The surge is hardly surprising: higher education, over the past three decades, has become a prerequisite for a middle-class life. But of course, as the matriculation rate has climbed, so has the number of students who enter college with marginal credentials and other handicaps. The least academically prepared and most economically hard-pressed among them are typically bound for community college, where low-income students—plenty of them the first in their family to venture beyond high school—outnumber their high-income peers 2-to-1. Many of these students are already juggling jobs and family commitments by their late teens (McGee and his longtime girlfriend had a baby daughter in the fall of his freshman year). This could hardly be a more challenging population to serve.