Mayor Pledges $50M To Bolster Community Colleges

BARBARA BOWEN: Likes ideas, but need more staff.

Mayor Bloomberg Aug 13 announced that he would invest $50 million over four years in City University of New York community colleges if re-elected in November, pledging to open a new college in Manhattan and gear programs towards growing job fields like health-care and environmental auditing.

The Professional Staff Congress praised the Mayor's new focus on community colleges but said his proposal lacked elements its members have pushed for, such as the expansion of full-time teaching staff and control of tuition fees.

'Make Them More Accessible'

"Sixty percent of CUNY's community college students come from households that earn less than $30,000 a year, and 66 percent of them work at least part time while taking classes," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We owe it to them to make our community colleges more accessible, accountable and effective at preparing New Yorkers for high-demand and higher-paying jobs."

Among the specific investments promised were a bolstering of on-campus child-care and counseling in an effort to help the schools retain more of their students and get them to graduate faster. The announcement was made at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which has suffered from particularly low gradua- tion rates.

PSC President Barbara Bowen said that she was "glad to see the proposal for significant investment," calling it "something that the PSC has been calling for, for many years, even years in which Mayor Bloomberg himself has proposed cuts to CUNY."

Agreeing with the Mayor that demand for community colleges had only risen during the recession, she said that issues such as increased counseling for students and child-care had originated with the PSC. "We have advocated in Albany for increased access to child-care for students and also for faculty. It's something that our faculty would like to see expanded to them; we have worked with students on improving their programs."

'Need More Full-Time Faculty'

But Ms. Bowen noted that while the Mayor's investments would be helpful, "the single most important factor in student success is changing the ratio of full-time to part-time faculty, and that is not mentioned here. . . to move some of our part-time faculty into full-time positions and to increase some of our full-time faculty, that would be transformative."

She also worried that some of the investments would have to be paid for with more tuition hikes. CUNY raised its tuition fees by 15 percent last year, after six years of no raises. "Nothing is more of a barrier to student enrollment and retention than tuition. Any program for retention of students has to include bringing that tuition to an affordable level," she said.

Mr. Bloomberg's proposal was more industry-based, focusing on "fields where demand for workers are growing." He explained that the city's new 5,000-student community college would offer classes in these fields, like nursing and green jobs. He said he hoped that the school, which will have interim space in John Jay College before building its own campus, would "be like no other school in the country."

Ambitious Goals

The $50-million investment would be built upon with private donations, including $500,000 already pledged by the Gates Foundation, Mr. Bloomberg said, and would hope to graduate 120,000 students by 2020.

"The future of our country is in education," the Mayor said. "A high school degree or a GED isn't enough for a lot of jobs, and people training for careers that don't exist is sort of a waste of time."