Why Community College Students Are ‘Stopping Out’

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at “stopping out” and how it is affecting community colleges. We’ll also look at Ivana Trump’s arc in New York.

Nicholas Figueroa, above, is to meet with an academic adviser at Queens College next week who probably won’t like what he is going to say.

Figueroa has decided to “stop out”: He’s putting his education on hold to continue working — again. He delivered the same message a year ago, deferring enrollment to stay on the job at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant where he keeps the video games pinging and the bucking broncos bucking when children climb on.

“I’m doing the same thing again, for the same reason,” said Figueroa, 21, who worked there part-time before graduating with an associate degree from LaGuardia Community College last year. “You have to put your aspirations on hold because of the reality of financial well-being.”

And if that means putting off school, so be it, he said. “There’s no one telling you you have to finish in four years,” he said. “Going into the job market and seeing what’s out there, you’re making more than you expected. When you’re presented with that, it’s very easy to disregard going back to school and say, ‘I’m making money now.’”

In today’s hot labor market, the money can be irresistible for students like Figueroa. And no wonder: As my colleague Jeanna Smialek wrote last month, rank-and-file workers have benefited from the sharpest wage growth since the early 1980s, especially in lower-wage jobs in industries like leisure and hospitality or trade and transportation.

“We have students who are making $50 an hour to babysit,” said Maria Conzatti, the president of Nassau Community College on Long Island. “The first time I heard that, I thought, ‘Jeez, Louise, $50 an hour.’ When I was babysitting, it was $5, and I thought that was a lot of money. And they are making 25 an hour to be a barista at Starbucks with whatever benefits come along with that. They really don’t feel they need to have an education.”

One result has been a decline in enrollments. Nationwide figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showed that 351,000 fewer students enrolled in community college programs this spring than had done so a year earlier, a decline of 7.8 percent. Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, community colleges have lost more than 827,000 students, according to the clearinghouse.

Educators worry that students who put school on hold — and boast about rapid raises and promotions — could languish in a downturn. “You’re going to have industries that say, ‘Do you have a credential? Do you have a microcredential? What do you have that we would hire you for?’” Conzatti said. “That will be the reality check.”

Kenneth Adams, the president of LaGuardia, said the pandemic had interrupted the education plans of many of the students who had “stopped out.”

“Our students came from households that immediately fell behind in rent,” he said. “We’re trying to encourage them to come back to LaGuardia this fall, and mom is saying, ‘Wait, we need you to keep working’” because the state moratorium on evictions was lifted in January.

Still, there are signs that enrollment will rebound. LaGuardia’s applications for the fall semester are up 17.5 percent, and its work force training programs were up 17 percent in March from a year ago.

And programs that point students to in-demand jobs are thriving. “We cannot produce pharmaceutical technicians for CVS fast enough,” Adams said, while Conzatti mentioned a newly acquired building for a program in culinary arts and hospitality, a front-burner project with restaurants hiring “from Manhattan to the Hamptons,” she said.

Figueroa, who said he makes $15 an hour at Chuck E. Cheese, is saving up to enter a bachelor’s degree program at Queens College. He hopes to break into broadcasting eventually, but he wants $10,000 in the bank before he enrolls.

He said he is about halfway toward that goal, “but things happen in life that cost.”

Weather

Prepare for showers and thunderstorms throughout the day and the evening, with temperatures near the mid-80s. At night, temps will drop to the mid-70s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).

The top Metro news

• Gearing up for 2025: Barely six months after taking office, Mayor Eric Adams has raised more than $850,000 for his 2025 re-election campaign.

• Knights unionize: The horsemen, courtiers, stablehands and other performers at the Medieval Times, a tourist attraction in Lyndhurst, N.J., formed a new kind of medieval guild when they voted to unionize.

Arts & Culture

• A jukebox opera: “Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,” said the head of the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y. Coming soon: Ken Ludwig’s “Tenor Overboard.”

• The swamp comes to Brooklyn: A party in East Williamsburg invited fans of the 2001 film “Shrek” to translate into reality their online obsessions with the titular ogre.

Ivana, the ‘first lady’

For a week or two in the 1990s, I joked to friends that I was the Donald-and-Marla reporter for The New York Times, which was like being the Pentagon reporter for The National Enquirer: you heard a lot of great stuff that your editors weren’t the least bit interested in.

It was at most a minibeat for me, focused on Donald and Ivana Trump’s divorce case. Other reporters covered the courtroom. I was assigned to talk to divorce lawyers and explain some of the maneuvering in Trump v. Trump.

Marla was, of course, Marla Maples, who became Donald Trump’s second wife after flirting with him in church and confronting Ivana on the slopes in Aspen, Colo. “I’m Marla, and I love your husband — do you?” Maples asked, according to Ivana’s book “Raising Trump.” (I’m going to refer to Ivana by only one name here, partly for clarity, partly because everybody else in New York did.)

Ivana, who died last week at 73, was in her 30s when she became a mainstay of New York’s tabloid-celebrity culture. It was as if the hors d’oeuvres tray was being passed to a new generation. Ivana was nearly a half century younger than Brooke Astor, still the doyenne.

But, as the society photographer Patrick McMullan said the other day, it was Ivana who put the bold in boldface.

It was also Ivana who put the “the” in “the Donald.” Definite articles had a way of coming and going for the Czech-born Ivana — as when she said in 2017 “I’m basically first Trump wife. I’m first lady, OK.” Melania Trump’s communications director at the White House called the remark “attention-seeking and self-serving noise.”

By the time her ex was in the White House, Ivana said she liked “Italian men, Italian food, Italian mountains, Italian men, everything Italian” — even the Italian version of “Dancing With the Stars,” which she had just appeared on. She said this at a party in 2018 promoting a diet created by — yes — an Italian entrepreneur.

That was a year after Maples had appeared on the American version of “Dancing With the Stars,” which had prompted this reaction from Ivana: “What a disgrace! No class!”

METROPOLITAN diary

Last night was a movie

Dear Diary:

“Last night was a movie,” Swati said as she bit into her sandwich.

We had all gone out the night before to celebrate Faiz’s birthday at an open mic night at Harlem Nights, where neon lights illuminated tipsy faces and a singular disco ball twirled at the front of the stage.

I was immediately enchanted by the place’s energy: Strangers fist-bumped one another, dancers grooved to jazzy tunes and servers holding trays of margaritas wove through the crowd.

“What’s up, Swati?” the M.C., rocking dreads and sunglasses, said. “You goin’ up tonight?”

“You know it,” Swati said. “I’m singing something I wrote this morning.”

Throughout the show, we were treated to a parade of musical geniuses: a performer who was born for Bruno Mars ballads, a saucy artist with a homemade knit beanie and a rapper who defied the laws of oxygen.

“Whose birthday is it?” the M.C. called out at intermission. “Let’s sing for you!”

We cheered for Faiz as he took the stage.

“Can I get on the drums?” he asked.

The M.C. lowered his sunglasses to get a clearer look at Faiz’s face.

“Do you play?” he asked.

Taking the question as an invitation, Faiz picked up the sticks and hit a flawless intro fill. The crowd went wild. The band quickly picked up on his beat and played the melody.

The backup singers jumped in on the next chords, cuing the audience to sing “Happy birthdayyy to youuu…” in perfect harmony. We had created the coolest rock rendition of “Happy Birthday” ever.

The entire bar chanted Faiz’s name as he came off the stage, his flushed face beaming.

“Best birthday ever,” he said.

Yes, last night was a movie.

— Laura Yin

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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