In April, the New York City Council released its response to the FY2026 Preliminary Budget, which featured several proposals that closely align with recommendations put forth by the Center for an Urban Future.

Create CUNY Flex

The City Council proposed a new investment of $48.4 million in FY26 to launch and scale CUNY Flex. CUF first proposed the idea of a CUNY Flex program, in our March 2024 report, Boosting Transfer Student Success at CUNY. We called on city leaders to establish CUNY Flex to provide wraparound services to non-traditional, part-time learners—including adult learners—not eligible for CUNY ACE or ASAP.

Our November 2024 report found that most adult learners can’t take advantage of many of CUNY’s successful college persistence programs because they require full-time enrollment, shutting out the 55 percent of adult learners who study part-time.

Launch CUNY Fresh Start

The Council proposed establishing CUNY Fresh Start, an initiative drawn from a CUF recommendation that would reduce or eliminate unpaid balances up to $1,000 to help students re-enroll in CUNY programs and obtain their degree. This program is included within the expanded CUNY Reconnect program. Council urges a baseline funding of $11.8 million in FY26 (up from $5.9 million) to re-enroll more adults in CUNY and launch a debt forgiveness program to support re-enrollment.

This was the first recommendation in our January 2025 report and a key idea from our November 2024 report. This 2024 report found that unpaid balances, even those as little as $250, are a major factor in preventing students from reenrolling in CUNY and bar students from persisting across semesters. We urged city leaders to “establish CUNY Fresh Start, an initiative to reduce or eliminate unpaid balances up to $1,000 to help more adult learners to re-enroll at CUNY and complete their degree.”

Expand CUNY ACE

The response also called for the expansion of the CUNY ACE program, increasing baseline funding from $10.1 million to $15 million starting in FY26. This expansion reflects CUF’s January 2025 recommendation to “expand CUNY’S highly successful but small-scale ACE program to help more senior college students succeed.”

CUF has highlighted the success yet small scale of CUNY ACE in numerous publications such as our March 2023 Playing New York City’s ACE Card report where we noted, CUNY ACE at the time had served “just 3.1 percent of the approximately 93,300 full-time students seeking bachelor’s degrees at CUNY’s senior colleges,” but helped boost graduation rates by roughly 42 percent.

CUNY Free Commuting Pilot Program

The City Council also called for $500,000 to fund a pilot program providing free four month unlimited ride MetroCards to 473 low-income CUNY students per semester. CUF originally proposed the idea of providing free transit cards to community college students in December 2017, in order to address a key, non-tuition barrier contributing to drop-out rates. We also urged the city in July of 2025 to “provide free OMNY cards for CUNY students and workforce training participants.”

Our research has found that for full-time students, a Metrocard will usually cost more than $1,000 each school year and that 90% of CUNY community college students primarily take public transit to school.

Minority Business Accelerator

The Council proposes $1 million in funding to launch a cohort-based accelerator focused on helping scale-up minority-owned small businesses. This initiative is directly inspired by CUF’s 2022 report titled, Scaling Minority Businesses: Adapting Cincinnati’s Accelerator for NYC, in which we urged city leaders to replicate Cincinnati’s successful Minority Business Accelerator to help more of New York’s minority-owned businesses grow into larger, job-generating entities. We also featured the idea in our 2024 report, 5 Ideas to Expand Economic Mobility in NYC, and in 15 Policy Ideas for NYC to Start 2025. In their coverage of Speaker Adrienne Adams’s State of the City address The New York Times noted that CUF had proposed the idea.