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.”
