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CUNY Releases Strategic Plan with 2030 Vision


CUNY Chancellor, left, City Council Speaker, center, and other CUNY officials (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council Media Unit)


Looking ahead to next school and beyond, the City University of New York (CUNY) announced “CUNY Lifting New York,” a strategic plan that intends to transform CUNY into the nation’s foremost student-centered university system by the end of the decade. The plan, released June 28, outlines four main goals for CUNY: to become a national leader in educating diverse classes of students; to modernize its system and workforce; to boost student outcomes and remove academic equity gaps; and to bolster its research and community engagement opportunities.

It comes just after the close of another school year as the city’s sprawling public university system has stabilized somewhat after the most tumultuous years of the covid pandemic. The health and economic damages of the pandemic, remote learning, enrollment declines — especially at community colleges — and other major issues have presented CUNY stakeholders with immense challenges. The CUNY Lifting New York plan is part of the university’s efforts to continue its recovery and enhance its ever-important place in the city.

“For more than 175 years, the City University of New York has served as an important vehicle of upward mobility, ensuring an accessible, quality education to all New Yorkers regardless of background or circumstances,” stated William C. Thompson Jr., the CUNY Board of Trustees Chairperson, in a statement unveiling the plan. “The CUNY Lifting New York plan will ensure that the University will continue on this path for decades to come.”

In the summer of 2021, CUNY’s chancellor, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, charged CUNY’s Office of Academic Affairs with the creation of the strategic plan. A steering committee convened thereafter, leading town halls and listening sessions in which over 2,000 community members participated. The release of the seven-year roadmap marks the culmination of that work.

The plan’s website outlines initiatives related to each of its four goals as well as steps CUNY has begun to take to reach them. CUNY also intends to publish action plans every year through 2030, providing updates about both achieved and anticipated progress. 

The announcement of the roadmap follows a boost in CUNY funding from the state budget, passed in early May. It represented the second straight year of significant additional state investments in CUNY.

The new state budget allocated $821.4 million to CUNY’s operating funds, an increase of $103 million from the prior fiscal year, and invested $1.1 billion in CUNY capital support, which included $384 million for the maintenance of current facilities, $535 million for expansion and renovation projects, and $119.7 million for community colleges. The budget also maintained CUNY’s tuition for New York State residents, as the State Legislature rejected Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposal to increase tuition amid declines in enrollment and consequently in tuition revenue. 

“Ensuring public colleges and universities remain affordable and accessible to all New Yorkers is a top priority for the Assembly Majority,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, said after the budget passed. “This year, as always, we fought to ensure that tuition remains as it is today and that our SUNY and CUNY schools have a multiyear commitment of funding that is necessary to continue delivering a world class education to students.”

And just a day after the new Lifting plan’s release, CUNY avoided serious cuts in funding from the New York City budget.

Mayor Eric Adams’ preliminary budget plan would have reduced the city’s funding to CUNY to $1.27 billion, a decrease of approximately $169 million from the fiscal year that is about to end, according to City Council documentation. The cuts would have made their hardest hit at CUNY’s community colleges, funded primarily by the city, where enrollment has dropped during the pandemic. The City Council pushed back in its response, calling upon Adams in March to “provide the funding necessary to bolster our public post-secondary learning institutions.”  

In his executive budget released in April, Adams proposed cutting CUNY’s funding by $41 million annually over the next three fiscal years — to which the City Council again voiced its discontent. “This Executive Budget jeopardizes CUNY’s ability to provide the academic and support services necessary to catapult low-income New Yorkers into the middle class,” it wrote in response. 

James Davis, President of the Professional Staff Congress CUNY, a union that represents 30,000 CUNY faculty and professional staff, likewise criticized the mayor’s executive budget. “The mayor has proposed repeated rounds of unsustainable cuts to CUNY, eliminating hundreds of unfilled — but critically needed — faculty and staff lines, and undermining students’ academic and career success,” Davis said in a statement. “Cutting CUNY undermines New York’s communities, workforce, and economy.” 

Due to the Council’s pushback, the new city budget — announced June 29 — for the fiscal year beginning July 1 restored $32.4 million in support for CUNY. “Thankfully, the Council was able to stop the Mayor pulling the ladder of opportunity up behind him in this budget,” Davis wrote on behalf of PSC CUNY. 

“As two former CUNY students whose education made it possible for us to now lead our city as Mayor and Speaker, we should support opportunities for others to benefit the same,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams wrote of herself and Eric Adams (no relation) last week in an amNY op-ed. “Harmful funding cuts proposed in the Fiscal Year 2024 Executive budget place CUNY on the chopping block and the future of countless students in jeopardy.” 

CUNY’s first goal in its new roadmap, which is to provide a world-class, attainable education to diverse communities, requires removing barriers to enrollment and retention, the plan states. Through its Reconnect program, established in 2022 with Speaker Adams, the university system has already re-enrolled more than 16,000 students who left a CUNY school before obtaining their degree. The city’s new budget allocates $5.8 million to CUNY Reconnect. 

Going forward, CUNY also aims to improve its outreach to high schoolers and expand modes of teaching — including online learning — that are more flexible and therefore more convenient and accessible to students. CUNY Online, which boasts over 140 fully online degree programs, was launched this March. 

As another facet of its first goal in the new plan, CUNY intends to bolster the pipeline of students of color and other underrepresented groups entering professional and graduate programs. The plan identifies advanced degrees as a critical factor in upward economic mobility, proposing mentoring programs that would target high-achieving students from underserved populations. “We will ensure the skills, knowledge and experience needed to meet the demands of a 21st century knowledge economy are open to all communities,” it states. 

In addition, CUNY expects to improve communication among its many schools by establishing more course equivalencies across institutions, facilitating the transfer process for students. In February, CUNY passed a resolution to implement a university-wide transfer credit system. In past years, students earning associate degrees would lose credits if they switched to a bachelor’s degree program for the same major at another CUNY college. Under the new system, by the beginning of the 2025 calendar year at the latest, students who transfer between programs will be able to retain all of their credits in a given major.

“Evidence has repeatedly demonstrated that students’ time to degree completion directly correlates with their graduation rates,” the plan reads. “Factors that unnecessarily delay educational progression are inefficient, costly, and unjustifiable.” 

Another objective in CUNY’s seven-year plan — modernizing its system — involves implementing coordinated technological systems across schools. It also entails maintaining and renovating facilities, ensuring they are efficient, sustainable, and accessible — projects whose funding can draw from the state’s recent $1.1 billion investment in capital support.

“It is only through upgrading our facilities portfolio that the University will be able to ensure that our graduates are ready for the high-demand industries and positions of today and of the future,” the plan continues. 

But modernizing CUNY’s system also means considering new budget models and moving away from “overreliance” on state and city funding, the plan states. Instead, a multi-year capital and operational budget planning process will promote CUNY’s financial independence, lessening the “the impact of cyclic budget fluctuations.” To expand fundraising efforts, CUNY appointed James D. Gallo — who has served in development roles at UCLA, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and Dartmouth — as a vice chancellor in 2022. 

“Our ability to evolve as an institution is limited by funding constraints and the rigidity of historical policies and practices,” the plan explains. “We must pursue additional creative sources of funding beyond governmental support to grow our faculty, research and creative activities, and programs to support student success.” 

In 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature made a historic investment in CUNY funding, providing the university system with a $1.2 billion increase. CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodríguez called it “the largest and most consequential expansion of public support for postsecondary education in years.”

The state’s renewed commitment follows historically unstable funding, which has been met with backlash from students, professors, and others. In 2020, amid the onset of the pandemic, former Governor Andrew Cuomo withheld approximately 20% of the state’s $2 billion support for CUNY, which had devastating consequences for many of its colleges, Gothamist reported. 

City support has not been dependable either, given Adams’ repeated threats to reduce funding. “For CUNY to remain the world class educational, research, and workforce development institution that New Yorkers need and deserve, the City must restore planned cuts and work with the State to establish more reliable funding streams for the university system,” the City Council wrote in response to Adams’ proposed executive budget. 

Beyond financial sustainability, the strategic plan goes on to discuss boosting student outcomes, stating that CUNY will provide its students with a strengthened ethic of care and its staff with new professional development training. The university system also intends to make its academic programming more equitable, a goal it has worked toward by phasing out non-credit-bearing remedial courses over the last seven years. CUNY ended a policy last year that banned its colleges from withholding enrollment verification and official transcripts to students with unpaid tuition or fees as well. 

To improve student outcomes, CUNY will also emphasize potential career pathways beginning as early as orientation, drawing clearer links between its curricula and students’ goals for their future. In 2022, the university system launched its Inclusive Economy Initiative, a $16 million program aimed at improving internship, advising, and engagement opportunities for students. 

“About half of our students are first generation college students…They have not thought about what’s next after college, they have not thought about where they see themselves, and in a profession, in a career, in an opportunity,” Matos Rodríguez said last year in a conversation about the state of CUNY on Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast. “We need to be very intentional about providing those opportunities.”

The final objective outlined in the seven-year roadmap is to advance CUNY’s community through improved public-impact research and strengthened relationships with alumni, affiliates, and industry leaders. No central alumni organization currently exists, which limits connections within communities and opportunities for achievement, according to the plan. It adds that some post-graduate outcomes are “less than would be predicted based on student achievement,” pointing toward bolstered connections with potential employers as a solution. 

“CUNY is singular in its ability to uplift the trajectory of its students, the City and State of New York, the nation, and the world through life-changing education,” the strategic plan states. “By expanding access, accelerating student success, strengthening academic quality and scholarly excellence, focusing on outcomes beyond graduation, engaging our communities, and modernizing across the system, we will amplify our impact as the nation’s greatest higher education engine of equity and upward mobility and advance the well-being of all residents of the City and State of New York.”

Max Politics Podcast: Westchester County Executive George Latimer on 'The Suburbs'


Westchester County Executive George Latimer (photo: Don Pollard/Governor's Office)


June 28, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: Westchester County Executive George Latimer on 'The Suburbs'

Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a Democrat, joined the show to discuss what's happening in his county, suburban politics north of New York City, differences between Westchester and Long Island, and more.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: Westchester County Executive George Latimer on 'The Suburbs'

Key State Senators Assess Failure to Reach Housing Deal, Potential Future Action


A potential site for housing (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)


For months, Governor Kathy Hochul and members of the Legislature have reiterated that housing is one of the state’s most pressing crises. However, throughout the 2023 Albany calendar — state budget season followed by the post-budget legislative session that ended earlier this month — they have struggled to agree on much beyond that. The Democratic governor just beginning her first full term in the role and the Democratic supermajorities in the two legislative houses did not agree on a package of substantial legislative action that might address the state’s massive housing challenges.

New York State has been slow to develop new housing, especially in New York City and its suburbs, where demand soars. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rents sank briefly, and due to moratorium measures passed by the state that ran until January 2022, eviction rates also decreased. Now, however, both have risen sharply again. Over half of New Yorkers are rent-burdened, according to the Population Reference Bureau, and tens of thousands are homeless.

Earlier this year, Hochul set forth a plan to build more than 800,000 units of new housing over the next decade, including by imposing mandatory growth targets for all local communities with a variety of mechanisms to help meet them. But the proposal was met with opposition in the Legislature, where there was more focus on tenant protections and some openness to efforts to further encourage but not require housing growth.

After no deal was reached in the state budget passed a month late in early May, negotiations continued to sputter through the weeks of legislative session to follow. As that session neared its mid-June end, the two legislative leaders said they had the framework of an agreement on a package of housing proposals, but they did not vote on it or even publish many details, claiming Hochul stood in their way.

“Unfortunately, it was clear that we could not come to an agreement with the governor on this plan,” said State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie in a joint statement. “It takes all three parties — the Senate, the Assembly and the governor — in order to enact legislation into law.”

In the June 8 statement, the leaders said that “the Legislature was able to work toward an agreement on historic rent protections as well as a massive and transformational housing program,” and listed about a dozen housing policies that were part of the framework.

Hochul, in response, said through a spokesperson that the Assembly and Senate were blaming her for “their own failure to act” and appeared to challenge the two houses to produce an actual bill and vote it through.

Inaction has spurred a great deal of frustration and finger-pointing, along with some resolve. Hochul has pledged to announce executive action on housing in the near-term and to continue to work for more support for her New York Housing Compact, while many legislators have said they will continue to pursue policies to address the multi-faceted housing crisis.

In recent interviews on Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast, two key State Senators from New York City — Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat and chair of the Senate’s housing committee, and Julia Salazar, a Brooklyn Democrat who is the lead sponsor of the controversial Good Cause Eviction bill that was a key part of negotiations — deconstructed the Albany session and discussed the future of state housing policy.

What Happened
Kavanagh and Salazar both expressed deep frustration and disappointment with the outcome of the Albany year. Both senators were also supportive of a grand bargain that would incorporate many of Hochul’s ideas as well as the Legislature’s priorities, including Good Cause Eviction, but not enough of their colleagues felt similarly in order to make such a deal possible.

Kavanagh stressed that the Senate and Assembly had the votes to pass the package of housing policies listed in the legislative leaders’ June 8 statement, but, believing Hochul would veto it based on a threat to do so, decided against advancing that confrontation.

“The critical thing is that we manage these negotiations, including the relationship between the two houses and the governor, in a manner that gets us to success,” Kavanagh said.

Salazar recognized that the two leaders were forced to make a difficult decision on short notice but said she still wished they had opted to vote through the package. “Whether the governor would ultimately decide to veto it or try to negotiate chapter amendments or sign the bill, we still have a responsibility as a legislature to act,” she said. “It was deeply disappointing and shocking to learn that it just wasn’t going to happen.”

The package outlined by legislators included few of the pieces of Hochul’s Housing Compact, which found limited support in either house, and instead focused on more support and protection for tenants, some incentives for housing development, and a number of other specific planks.

It contained a compromise version of Salazar’s Good Cause Eviction legislation, an extension of the 421-a tax break to incentivize some construction of affordable rental housing, the Housing Access Voucher Program, efforts to encourage conversions of commercial space to residential, and more.

Salazar supports elements of Hochul’s Housing Compact, including mandatory growth targets and transit-oriented development, but acknowledged that the majority of legislators do not. “We wouldn’t have been able to arrive at the two-way agreement that we did at the end of this session if the mandates from the governor’s Housing Compact — basically any version of them — had been in this bill,” she said.

Kavanagh likewise supports growth targets but knew that policy diminishing local land use control would be met with fierce legislative resistance. Still, he was disappointed that the Legislature failed to reach a consensus that ensured localities were “doing their part,” he said.

Even though no package made it to Hochul’s desk this month, Kavanagh added, the negotiations were not all for nothing. “This is, I think, the halting and strange way Albany makes progress,” he said. “I do think that the template that we’ve laid out will be part of whatever fruitful negotiations we have in the future.”

Good Cause Eviction
Hochul opposes Good Cause Eviction, which aims to protect tenants in unregulated housing, but it remains unclear if she would support a version of it in order to win her Housing Compact — a question that does not appear to have ever been on the table given the Legislature’s opposition to the Compact’s central planks.

Good Cause Eviction would prohibit landlords from evicting tenants except in “good cause” cases like failure to pay rent, or other instances of lease violation, and would set limits on annual rent increases.

Many tenants have been hit with rent increases of 25%, Salazar said, though in extreme cases, that number has exceeded 500% — surges she described as “unethical [but] completely legal.”

“It is absolutely unaffordable for the vast majority of New Yorkers for their expenses to suddenly increase like that, but it’s happening right now,” she said, detailing the original bill that she’s sponsored for several years as well as the compromise version that was part of the package the two legislative houses say they had agreed upon but Hochul would not back.

The bill creates metrics for an “unreasonable” rent increase and a rebuttable presumption in the case that a landlord sought to evict a tenant after increasing rent by such an amount. In both versions of the bill, the cap would hit at whichever is greater of either a 3% rent increase or 1.5 times the percent change in the Consumer Price Index (a measure of inflation). Under the rebuttable presumption, if a landlord were to sue tenants who did not pay such a rent increase, the judge would presume rent to be unreasonable — though the landlord could convince the judge otherwise based on a number of potential factors like expenses.

The original bill applied to the entire state, though the compromise proposal would apply automatically only to New York City while other localities would be able to opt-in to the law and customize their program by adjusting threshold values, Salazar explained on the podcast.

The compromise version of the bill also added that rental buildings would be exempt for their first 15 years after construction, a clause created based on the pushback that Good Cause would disincentivize new rental housing development.

Salazar said, though, that it is “demonstrably false” to assume the expansion of tenant protections to unregulated renters would decrease development. California and New Jersey have implemented variations of the bill, and no evidence points to a decline in the construction of new housing as a consequence, she said.

“I would say it’s a really significant compromise, not one that I wanted to make, but that I knew was necessary,” Salazar said of the version of the bill in the agreement the legislative leaders said was in place but opposed by Hochul. “If I thought that this was the best version of Good Cause, then I would have made that the bill in the first place, so I won’t pretend that I like it. But it was something that I and everyone I’m accountable to — who have been fighting for this for years now — were ready to accept and live with.”

Salazar emphasized the bill’s importance in any housing package, arguing that building more housing or making housing more affordable without protecting the tenants who live there would fail to solve the crisis the state faces.

“What will help people the most immediately is providing protections from unjust evictions and unreasonable rent increases through Good Cause,” she added.

Kavanagh stressed how significantly the bill’s supporters compromised in order to ensure it made it into the package. “For all our talks about Good Cause Eviction legislation, it’s not something that has moved through either house in the last couple of years,” he said.

He added that he believes concerns about Good Cause halting new construction were in part “a function of a very effective, well-funded public relations operation by the real estate industry.”

Other Policies
The legislative compromise package also contained the Housing Access Voucher Program, which Kavanagh is the lead sponsor of in the Senate and seeks to establish a statewide rental subsidy for individuals experiencing homelessness or severe housing instability.

“Even if we get production right and dramatically increase supply, that’s a very long-term process,” Kavanagh said. “We need an immediate solution to that, and it has become a very broad consensus — not just in the Legislature, but across the spectrum — that [a housing voucher program] is necessary.”

In their joint statement, the leaders also mentioned the inclusion of “a local affordable housing plan,” but did not elaborate on what that meant. Asked on the podcast, Kavanagh said it would require every locality to assess their own housing needs and put forth a public plan explaining how they expected those needs to be met.

Beyond the failed package, Kavanagh stressed that some housing bills were passed: the renewal of J-51, which provides tax breaks to landlords undertaking renovations of low-cost housing; the allocation of almost $400 million more into the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP); the addition of $40 million for the Homeowner Protection Program; and a few other items.

What’s Next
While looking ahead to another budget and legislative session next year in which she wants to win major housing policies, Hochul has repeatedly stated a vow to take executive action in the near-term to address the housing crisis. There are a number of potential steps she may take, including the use of state-owned land, but the governor has also acknowledged that fixing the state’s housing supply shortage will need to be done with the Legislature.

Kavanagh said that though he supports action from Hochul, the solution would ultimately require consensus with the Senate and Assembly. “At the end of the day, I don’t think we’re going to solve these problems without legislative and budgetary action,” he said.

Salazar voiced skepticism about the governor’s pledge, explaining that she didn’t believe Hochul fought as hard as she could for many of her Compact’s unpopular policies in negotiations about the state budget. “[To] take executive action to impose those things just seems kind of inconsistent and maybe a political risk that I wouldn’t expect her to take,” she said.

“But I’m definitely interested to see the governor demonstrate that she wants to take action on creating more housing,” Salazar added.

She also said she plans to advocate for a special session in Albany later this year. “We have the opportunity to do this — and really the responsibility to do it — and ultimately, if it wasn’t done by the time session ended, then my perspective is that we still have that responsibility,” Salazar said. “It would really be a shame at this point … if we fail to act and act soon.”

LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: Senate Housing Chair Brian Kavanagh on State Negotiations & What Comes Next

LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: Senator Julia Salazar on State Housing Policy & Good Cause Eviction Negotiations

Ben Max contributed to this story.



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