Records show that only about half those transfer students come in from CUNY’s second-tier colleges or community colleges. The rest come from outside the system, including private schools from around the country and the world. It is unclear how many of the students who transfer grew up in New York City and attended public high schools there. (Update, January 15, 2015: CUNY has stated that 84 percent of its transfer students either attended CUNY college or lived in New York City prior to enrollment at a top-tier CUNY college, but an unknown number of those students may have established residency in New York City immediately prior to applying.)

“At a time of massive and widening inequality gaps in New York City, CUNY has a responsibility to address these equity gaps within and across its colleges,” said Michelle Fine, a CUNY graduate center professor of psychology and urban education. “I fear that we have lost thousands of talented and engaged students of color who are rejected by our senior colleges and yet accepted by other highly competitive private colleges and universities.”

The changes began when CUNY’s new chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, was given a mandate in 1999 to rehabilitate the university, which had been battered for decades by budget cuts, political infighting, and social unrest. By the time he retired last year, Matthew Goldstein was widely acclaimed for increasing enrollment and retention, stabilizing the budget, attracting private donations, and improving the status of CUNY’s top five colleges. Headlines trumpeted his tenure with puns on his name: “Good as Goldstein” and “Pure Goldstein.”

But the prestige has come at a cost. New-student data confirm that CUNY's top five colleges have enrolled fewer and fewer black and Latino freshmen over the last decade.** (A request for data on freshman admissions, reflecting where students attended high school, was denied by CUNY.) The students weren’t necessarily being bounced down into the second-tier four-year colleges, either—Lehman, John Jay, York, Staten Island, Medgar Evers, and City Tech. Those collective black and Latino enrollments fell off by 6 percent as well.

This race disparity within the CUNY system widened most noticeably after the 2008 recession, when CUNY’s bargain tuition rates began drawing more middle-class families. Applications surged. That same year, CUNY increased its math SAT admission requirement 20 to 30 points for the five highly selective colleges. Department of Education records show that by 2012, the number of black public high school students enrolled as freshmen into the system’s top five colleges had decreased by 42 percent. Latinos dropped by 26 percent.**

The decline happened alongside a sharp rise in minority high school graduation rates during the same time span: 7 percent for blacks, 20 percent for Hispanics. The racial skew became so pronounced that Baruch, the system’s business and science jewel, is now about 40 percent Asian. (In the city’s public schools, Asians represent less than 15 percent of the student body, while blacks and Latinos account for 70 percent.) Two years ago, only 7 percent of the students enrolled at Baruch were African American, and fewer than half of them were graduates of city high schools.**