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This program profile examines efforts by WPAs at York College, a senior college in the CUNY system, to adapt to externally imposed changes and develop a locally meaningful writing program. 1999 marked the end of remediation at four-year (senior) colleges in The City University of New York. The elimination of developmental writing at CUNY's senior colleges was accompanied by a university-wide mandate for WAC. Fall 2013 marked the start of a university-wide set of general education requirements that will partially eclipse existing local requirements. Between these two bookends, WPAs--drawing on a mindset of relative agency and informed by an awareness of the curricular and institutional positioning of writing--carried out local efforts to build a more effective and coherent program.

At York College, many of the students fit the linguistic and educational profile of basic writers, and yet there is no remediation built into the curriculum. It falls to the writing center, then, to provide our students with the academic support that they need in order to move beyond being classified as developmental writers. In this article, I examine how our students are using the York College Writing Center, with a view to determining how a lower level of academic preparedness influences the kind of services that students seek and the kind of academic trajectory they follow. I suggest that the progress that we see these students making over the course of the semester can be best understood as a move from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, rather than from lower- to higher-order concerns that is the professed goal of writing center philosophy. This article has implications for how writing centers can best serve less prepared students, especially in light of the national movement to end remediation, as well as for the ways in which we measure student success. (Contains 3 tables and 1 note.)