As 2024 ends, I am proud of a year of great progress for The City University of New York that has given us good reason to feel optimistic.
In 2024, our colleges welcomed more students and implemented more programs to help guide them to careers. It was a year of record-breaking funding for the University’s research, and a year of growth with the expansion of one school.
CUNY’s enrollment growth – 3% for the second year in a row – has solidified our rebound from the post-pandemic enrollment declines that impacted colleges nationwide and kept too many city students away from the transforming power of a college degree.
And we’re not slowing down. This fall, more than 55,000 New York high school seniors applied to CUNY colleges during our four-week fee-waiver period – a 62% increase over last year’s inaugural fee waiver campaign.
These students view college as key to their pursuit of fulfilling careers, and we are working hard to deliver on that promise. This year, we aggressively broadened our capacity to help them obtain paid internships, apprenticeships and full-time jobs. Our CUNY Spring Forward program grew by 60% thanks to funding from Governor Hochul. With Mayor Adams, we announced a nearly $12 million expansion of the CUNY Inclusive Economy Initiative. With help from the Robin Hood Foundation, academic departments began incorporating career-infused degree maps to keep students on track to compete for jobs in fields aligned with their majors.
This year also advanced CUNY’s work for the public good. We announced the elevation of our School of Medicine to a standalone CUNY institution, expanding the school’s reach by adding master’s, doctoral, post-graduate residency and other medical programs and strengthening the school’s mission of providing high quality health care service to underserved communities.
In February, we opened the Nursing Education, Research and Practice Center at Lehman College, a 52,000-square-foot facility that tripled the school’s capacity to train nurses. CUNY graduates 1,800 nurses each year, nearly half of the new nurses entering the city’s workforce annually.
It was also a banner year for public and private funding that will help advance CUNY’s educational, research and public mission for years to come. Our more than 10,000 researchers garnered $672 million in external funding in the last fiscal year, an all-time record high for the University.
Besides research funding, CUNY hit new highs for major gifts from our generous philanthropic donors. The Simons Foundation and Simons Foundation International provided a $75 million gift that will make CUNY a hub for computational science and artificial intelligence and support our participation in Governor Hochul’s Empire AI project. And CUNY has raised $4.7 million from 5,200 donations through this month’s #CUNYTuesday campaign, an all-time high for the annual day of giving and an increase of more than 30% since 2022. There’s still time to give and make an impact at cunytuesday.org.
CUNY also continued to grow this year as one of the nation’s most diverse universities. We became one of the first universities in the country to add to its school calendar Lunar New Year, the Muslim holidays Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and Diwali. CUNY colleges will have no classes on these holidays starting in 2025. The action was championed by students, who rightly argued that nobody should face the burden of missing a class so they can celebrate a holiday or festival that is key to their heritage.
This year was certainly not without its challenges, and we know we have a lot of work ahead because our ambitions to better serve our 240,000 students are high. But I know the enduring determination of the CUNY community will propel us forward and into new heights in 2025.
