What they do not learn is how much will be riding on it. Unknown to them, these students have applied to be test subjects in a multimillion-dollar experiment in how to fix what ails community colleges. CUNY has designed from scratch a new structure and new curriculum that it hopes will greatly improve students’ chances of earning an associate degree and transferring to a four-year college. Experts across the country are watching closely, hopeful that the college can serve as a national model.

The experiment raises many questions, of course. The most pressing may be whether its resource-intensive approach can be carried out on a large scale at a reasonable cost. And long before a single class was to be held, faculty members and administrators battled over what was best for students.

The students know none of this. Their eyes widen as two professors walk them through what lies ahead: summer and winter sessions, mandatory full-time enrollment for the first year, mandatory and frequent tutoring and counseling, courses that do not sound like anything they have seen before, and very little choice in classes.

These students do not display the habits or confidence that would have been instilled in a more privileged group. Just one of the 20 scribbles notes during the presentation, and when the floor is opened for questions, there are none. The professors, Nicola Blake and Tracy Daraviras, try hard to be open and engaging, stressing their own modest backgrounds; when they prod the students for reactions, though, they get little in return.

But the students listen. Not one of them talks or texts or gazes out a window.

Giselle Diaz, a soft-spoken high school senior from Brooklyn, read a brief description of the college and was intrigued enough to apply, but the details are all news to her. Destiny Jackson, a senior from the Bronx, liked the idea of going to school in Midtown — she used to work at the nearby Lord & Taylor — and of not seeing the same faces she saw throughout high school. Others in the room readily concede that they marked the New Community College on their CUNY applications just to round out the list of six schools they are allowed to name, in order of preference.