New Deal for CUNY

Concept Paper

Updated January 2022

Executive Summary

The City University of New York provides a world class education to poor and working class students, and CUNY faculty conduct cutting edge research. But for too long, CUNY has achieved its mission on a shoestring budget. If CUNY were funded at the same per-student rate as in 1990, its budget would be $920 million larger according to our calculations. If CUNY were tuition-free, as it was for more than a century, its 270,000 students - a majority of whom are people of color - would have more than a billion dollars total in their pockets to pay rent and make ends meet while they pursue college degrees.  

For $1.7 billion, New York State can fund CUNY as it was funded just a few decades ago, rebuild its core services, and make CUNY tuition-free again. The New Deal for CUNY (S4461*/A5843) is the vehicle to do it.  *S4461 was reintroduced in the 2023 legislative session under a new print number: S2146.

This chart summarizes the cost of the bill’s key operational elements. Please find an elaboration of the elements in the memo that follows, each of which concludes with a methodological discussion of the costing. We are ready to meet with budget staff and walk through the assumptions and decisions of the model that produced these outputs. 

Preamble 

The City University of New York provides a world class education, and its faculty conduct cutting edge research. New York State Senate Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins and New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie both have CUNY degrees. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has two CUNY degrees. Institutes like the Stone Center at CUNY’s Graduate Center produce research that is used across the country and beyond to make policy and to feed deeper scholarly inquiry. CUNY has graduated more than 1,000,000 alumni since 1990, the vast majority of whom remain in our great state, earning tens of billions more than they would have without their degree. In 2019, CUNY alumni contributed $4.2 billion to the tax base, more than 2% of the whole state budget!

CUNY is a place of intellectual exploration and of practical training. But for too long, CUNY has achieved its mission on a shoestring budget. State funding per student at the senior colleges has declined 18% since the Great Recession, and a shocking 38% since 1990. If CUNY were funded at the same per student rate as that year, its budget would be nearly a billion dollars larger. If CUNY were free, as it was for more than a century - from 1847 until 1975 - students would have another billion dollars in their pockets.  

It is time to fund CUNY like the economic and intellectual powerhouse that it is. As the New York City Comptroller’s March 2021 report demonstrated, investment in CUNY is key to reviving the state’s economy and addressing the racial and economic inequalities the pandemic sharpened. For less than two billion dollars, we can fund CUNY like it was funded not so long ago, and we can return to the working class students of CUNY the money that today the state takes from their pockets and their Pell grants. 

The New Deal for CUNY gets this done. 

Elements of the New Deal for CUNY

1. Increase the ratio of full-time faculty to students and professionalize adjunct compensation. 

Both full-time and part time faculty at CUNY are instructors of the highest caliber. However, the very structure of contingent adjunct labor harms the student experience. Adjunct faculty earn substantially less than their full-time counterparts, and often teach at multiple CUNY campuses as well as other universities. To enhance the quality of student experience and increase student retention and graduation rates, CUNY must substantially increase the number of full-time faculty and better compensate its adjunct faculty. The New Deal for CUNY would lift the ratio of full-time faculty to undergraduate students and close the equity gap between full-time and part-time salaries, prorated per course. 

A recent study by the CUNY University Faculty Senate found that, across both SUNY and CUNY, campuses with more students of color have fewer full-time faculty. And, conversely, whiter campuses have a greater proportion of full-time faculty. While this trend obtains in both systems, it disproportionately affects CUNY. In 2003, both CUNY and SUNY maintained overall ratios of 43 full-time faculty members to 1,000 full-time-equivalent (FTE) students in the four-year colleges, a number already below national norms for public universities. By 2019, the ratio at SUNY had increased to 49, while the ratio at CUNY dropped to 34.  At certain colleges within both systems, however, the ratio is even lower. The New Deal for CUNY phases in a ratio of 65 full-time faculty members per 1,000 FTE students at both senior and community colleges of CUNY.

A ratio of 65 full-time faculty members to 1,000 FTE students, or approximately 15 students to one full-time professor, would align CUNY with national averages. CUNY’s current ratio of 35 full-time faculty to every 1,000 FTE students creates a student to faculty ratio of 1:29. The national average ratio of full-time faculty to FTE students, according to the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics, is 1:14. Thus, there are nearly twice as many full-time faculty per student nationally than there are at CUNY. 

To reach this target, CUNY must hire approximately 5,800 new full-time faculty. As CUNY converts from a majority part-time faculty to a majority full-time faculty, adjunct faculty who have developed expertise in working with CUNY students should be hired in full-time positions. Further, CUNY must also use the substantial number of hires required in order to diversify its teaching and research faculty. The New Deal for CUNY places a responsibility on the CUNY administration to address these twin imperatives.

Because of recent advances in collective bargaining, the cost of professionalizing adjunct compensation is substantially lower than it would have been in years past, less than $35 million, assuming the hires above ($24 million at the senior colleges and just over $10 million at the community colleges). 

Total cost for the faculty elements of the bill:

Senior college cost: $355,726,453

Community college cost: $186,368,469

Total cost: $542,094,922

Methodology: This costing uses a five-year average of student and faculty data (Fall 2016 - Fall 2020) to construct existing ratios, calculating the number of faculty hires necessary to reach the legislation’s target ratio. The model assumes a teaching faculty that is 70% professors, and 30% lecturers. Then, we subtract the adjunct replacement costs of making faculty hires in these proportions. In this section and throughout, we use CUNY administration’s costing of fringe benefits (.51 for full-timers and .15 for adjunct faculty). To cost adjunct equity, we multiply the marginal cost per 3-credit course to achieve equity ($1,700) by the total number of three-credit equivalent courses remaining to be taught by adjuncts after full-time faculty hired under the New Deal for CUNY take up their full course loads. The costing model assumes the same number of courses will be taught system-wide.

2. Bring the ratios of mental health counselors and academic advisors to students in line with national standards.

CUNY students, perhaps more than any other college population in the country, bear stresses that make it extraordinarily difficult to stay in college, sometimes even to survive, a reality that COVID has served to further expose. Nearly 60 percent of CUNY undergraduates have family incomes under $30,000 a year. 80 percent are people of color. 36 percent report food insecurity. Many are parents, and more than half work at least half-time, contributing to household income. For thousands of CUNY students, every day is a struggle with poverty, hunger, racism, homelessness, low-wage work and parenting. For most CUNY students, the University is their only access to mental health counseling and to academic support. That CUNY students absorb the stresses they do and nevertheless persist in their college education is testament to their hunger for knowledge and commitment to transforming their lives. They know what is at stake in earning a college degree.

Yet CUNY’s ratio of mental health counselors to students falls dangerously below the national standard, a standard that assumes students with far fewer stresses and much more support. The International Accreditation of Counseling Services calls for a ratio of 1:1,000 mental health counselors to students. At CUNY, the ratio is closer to 1:2,700. The New Deal for CUNY would make a fundamental investment in students’ success and survival by phasing in a  ratio of one mental health counselor for every 1,000 students.

The New Deal for CUNY should reflect professional standards for academic advising, because academic advising is critical for student retention and success.  This is particularly the case for CUNY's diverse student population, described in demographic detail above. The successful CUNY ASAP program recognizes the importance of academic advising and establishes a 1:150 ratio for academic advisor caseloads. The professional literature on academic advising and the success of ASAP, along with our consultation with practitioners, indicate that an appropriate system-wide caseload for academic counselors is 250 students.  Thus, the costing is based on a proposed enhancement to the New Deal for CUNY, to phase-in an academic counselor to student ratio of 1:250.

Senior college cost: $66,721,182

Community college cost: $12,221,980

Total cost: $78,943,162

Methodology: This model uses a five-year average (Fall 2016 - Fall 2020) of student headcount, combined with CUNY’s public attestation about mental health counselor ratios and PSC-CUNY data on academic advisors to calculate real ratios, and number of hires needed at both senior and community colleges to hit target ratios. Here, we use the average professional staff salary for the hiring cost of one academic advisor, and the average salary for the top two titles in the professional staff series for the hiring cost of one mental health counselor.

3. Make CUNY free again: eliminate undergraduate tuition and fees for in-state undergraduate students and replace tuition income with public funds.

For more than a century, CUNY was tuition-free for New York residents. New York would not be the city and state it is today had CUNY not provided a way for each new wave of immigrants to receive a free, rigorous college education. Every one of CUNY’s Nobel Laureates attended tuition-free. It is not an overstatement to say that there would be no healthcare industry, no fashion industry, no publishing industry, a diminished finance industry and a scarcity of public school teachers in New York City if not for CUNY’s unmatched ability to offer new immigrants, the working class and the poor a chance to attend college that they received nowhere else. New York would not have been the gateway for successive generations of immigrants without access to free college.

The national conversation has shifted to a focus on free college and New York has the opportunity to lead on this issue yet again. CUNY began to charge tuition in the wake of “open admissions,” just as campuses were diversifying. For more than 100 years, the majority white student population at CUNY could attend without paying a dime in tuition. But today, when the student population is majority people of color, the State takes more than one billion dollars from the pockets of students - that is an average of more than $4,000 per student, per year. Put differently, that is groceries for the year - or a laptop and a few months rent. If a free CUNY was good enough for the majority white population in its first century, surely it is good enough for the majority students of color population today.

The New Deal for CUNY eliminates tuition and fees for in-state undergraduate students within specified time-frames for completion of degree.

Senior college cost: $834,634,000

Community college cost: $283,999,000

Total cost: $1,118,633,000

Methodology: In this model, the state redirects TAP money currently allocated to CUNY students to cover tuition, as well as money committed by the state to fill the TAP gap, as direct operating aid, and then replaces out-of-pocket tuition and fee income and Pell dollars recouped by CUNY for tuition, with direct state funding. The model uses CUNY’s publicly available data on tuition-related income (FY2022 enacted budget & FY2021 preliminary financial report). This approach does not include replacement costs for senior and community college scholarships. Publicly available information from CUNY does not disaggregate city, state, and private scholarships in this category, but presumably a substantial portion of this revenue could be repurposed in a tuition-free model. This model also does not include replacement costs for a category of revenue called “self-funded programs,” because the New Deal for CUNY makes in-state undergraduate tuition free, not the certificate and other programs included in this category. We include technology fees in the model, but because CUNY administration does not disaggregate this revenue item, we may have underestimated fee replacement costs. At the same time, CUNY does not disaggregate in-state from out-of-state tuition in publicly available documents, so the out-of-pocket costs in this model are likely overestimated. 

Operating Budget Costs of the New Deal for CUNY

Total senior college operating budget increase: $1,257,081,635

Total community college operating budget increase: $482,589,449

Total CUNY operating budget increase: $1,739,671,084

Capital Budget

Invest in capital renewal plan to address urgent issues of ventilation, safety, accessibility, energy, capacity and maintenance of CUNY buildings.

The most visible sign of systematic inadequate funding of CUNY is the state of its physical plant, and the COVID pandemic has made clear that the state of the physical plant can be deadly. Any renewal of CUNY must address the degraded and sometimes dangerous conditions in its classrooms, libraries and laboratories. 

While CUNY includes some important and beautiful new buildings, much of the physical plant is more than fifty years old. Decades of underinvestment means that these buildings have deteriorated and essential repairs have not been made. The result is massive overcrowding on many campuses, inadequate heating, cooling and ventilation, leaky roofs, broken plumbing, dangling ceiling tiles, dangerous pavements, failure to replace major electrical components, burst pipes, and other hazards. Too often, the physical environment at CUNY hinders rather than supports teaching and learning. As CUNY students return more fully to in-person instruction, we must be certain that our ventilation systems are fully functional, that our windows open, and that if new COVID variants (or other pandemics) emerge, we have the safest possible buildings. 

As a diverse, public university in a progressive state and the largest city in the nation, CUNY’s physical plant should send a message about the importance of education, about sustainability in an urban environment, and about hope. Education is inherently about the future, and CUNY has the opportunity to contribute to mapping out a sustainable future.  

The New Deal for CUNY as currently drafted mandates a five-year capital plan of $5.2 billion consistent with a pre-covid CUNY capital plan. However, CUNY’s latest capital request worth $5.6 billion and over five years, reflects the needs that COVID lays bare, and that is the request costed below.

Senior college capital cost: $4.4 billion

Community college capital cost: $1.2 billion

Total capital budget increase: $5.6 billion