City must reinvest in public higher ed

As the City Council and mayor prepare for an annual budget agreement, the PSC is urging the city to invest more in public higher education to make up for the attacks from the right-wing Trump administration.

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has made good on promises to defund higher education, eviscerate the federal Department of Education and withdraw vital grants for university research. This has hurt universities across the country, public and private.

CUNY has felt the pain, and over the years has suffered disinvestment from the city. There has been some good news for the CUNY budget. For example, after sustained pressure from the PSC and other activist groups, Mayor Eric Adams in May restored vital funding to CUNY that he had previously cut. And there were gains at the state level. A PSC statement explained that this year’s state budget agreement included the “governor’s Opportunity Promise scholarship,” which “will fund free community college for students ages 25-55 studying in certain high-demand fields in STEM and education.” The agreement also increased funding to many vital programs, including “year-over-year increases for the college completion programs ACE and ASAP ($8M), the opportunity program SEEK/College Discovery ($564K/$27K), Murphy Institute/School of Labor and Urban Studies ($2M), and other initiatives,” while “funding for CUNY community college base aid increased by $5.3 million.”

DO MORE

But the city can and must do more, the PSC said at a City Council Higher Education Committee hearing on May 15. Heather James, the legislative chair of the PSC, laid out the union’s ambitious budget request in her testimony:

“We also propose:

• Fulfilling the University’s obligation to the January 2025 ratified contract.
• Additional operating support to help CUNY navigate federal government cuts to grant funding.
• An additional $5.5 million to support an ASAP-for-all model and provide all students with academic support in CUNY’s most successful and nationally recognized program. ASAP’s system of full financial aid, robust wraparound services and high-contact advising leads to a graduation rate twice that of non-ASAP students. That’s what the college experience should be for every CUNY student, and we need more funding to get us closer to that goal.
• Expansion of ACE – the senior college version of ASAP. According to CUNY, ‘The most recent ACE freshman cohort admitted to John Jay College realized a four-year graduation rate of 60 percent, versus 41 percent for a matched comparison group of non-ACE students; the first transfer cohort at Lehman College realized a two-year graduation rate of 61 percent, versus 30 percent for a matched comparison group of non-ACE students. These effects are so large that they actually reduce the average cost per graduate by about 13 percent.’
• Hiring a more diverse pool of advisors and other faculty and staff to end CUNY’s crisis of understaffing. Moreover, we ask the Council to send a clear message to CUNY administration: Restored operating money must be used for hiring. Positions taken off the books cannot stay there. The city funds nearly 75% of community colleges. Adams’s cuts decimated staffing, and CUNY must make rehiring a priority.
• CUNY Reconnect has been an unquestionable success, bringing back 47,000 students. The PSC was pleased to see the mayor include a $5.9 million restoration to the program. These funds should be baselined, and we agree with CUNY that the program should receive an additional $2.9 million for expansion.
• Replicating ASAP’s successful use of free MetroCards to all CUNY students. Our members regularly hear that too many students do not make it to class or risk punishment when they evade a fare because they do not have the funds available to commute to campus. CUNY and the Council have urged the city administration to fund a MetroCard/OMNY pilot program with $500,000 in fiscal year 2026 to provide transportation benefits for 473 students in need.”

James added other proposals, such as adding $2.8 million for increased mental health access for students and $7 million for increased faculty and staff numbers.

In an interview with PSC President James Davis, amNY reported on the importance of the union’s city budget push at the City Council.

“[T]he union is advocating for interim ‘bridge funding’ from the city, ‘so that these projects can continue for the near future, because any long-term solution is going to have to involve restoration of federal funding,’” the paper said, noting that Davis “stressed that the goal of the testimony being delivered to the City Council is not only to secure funding but to underline the broader implications: ‘Our goal is on the one hand, to make a case for funding, and as well, to make that case, not just for the individual careers or flourishing of the affected professor, but for the impact that that has on the city as a whole.’”

CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez said in his testimony that he believed the city’s community colleges, which depend greatly on city funding, looked good because of the mayor’s recent budget restorations and because of “additional support from our partners at the state level.”

CENTER STUDENTS

He added in his testimony: “We ask that you support the inclusion of the following student-centric priorities in the adopted budget. These priorities include: application fee waivers ($1.4M), CUNY Reconnect ($8.8M), food insecurity ($2M), additional mental health services for students ($2.8M), programming to prevent religious and ethnic discrimination ($500K), CUNY Citizenship Now! ($5M), services for students with disabilities ($2.1M), OMNY/MetroCards ($500K) and CUNY Beyond ($7M).”

PSC members from around the University have raised the alarm about the harm federal cuts have done to the University, noting that full city funding for CUNY could help. Davis told amNY that “over 60 grant-funded projects at CUNY had been canceled.”

In May, The City reported that the Trump administration cut off funding for the Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement (U-RISE), which “supports the pursuit of advanced degrees by students in the biomedical field, who are offered tuition assistance, mentorship, registration to professional conferences and, crucially, lab experience.”

John Dennehy, a professor of biology at Queens College, testified that the National Science Foundation terminated the grant for his project studying COVID-19 in wastewater, “claiming it ‘no longer aligned with current NSF priorities.’ The true reason? We proposed training students from financially disadvantaged and underserved communities for high-paying positions in city agencies.”

IMPORTANT STUDY

Claire Wladis, a professor of mathematics at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, reported: “Our $2.25 million five-year NSF EDU Core Research grant was terminated last Friday by NSF without warning or explanation beyond a statement that it ‘no longer effectuate[s] the program goals or agency priorities.’ The goal of this research was to explore how existing college structures support or impede the degree progress of STEM majors who experience illness, injury, disability, or physical or mental health conditions during college. This grant was the first large-scale research to study how illness, injury and disability impact STEM majors academically, and what colleges need to do to support them.”

Wladis noted that the study was extremely important. She said, “Only one in 10 of these students identified as having a disability, and almost none had sought formal accommodations or official supports for their condition from the college. Many had taken informal steps to support their STEM degree completion in the face of illness or disability, but college-level factors often got in the way. Yet these students continued to persist in their pursuit of a STEM degree, often at high personal cost and with little support.”

EMOTIONAL RESPONSE

She added, “Several students wept during the research interviews when recounting their experiences, yet all of them insisted on continuing the interview because they felt that this research would be helpful to other students in their shoes in the future. However, the grant was terminated before we could do any analysis of the data or write up the results, so these students’ stories will never be shared, or have the chance to impact college policy or structures, at CUNY or elsewhere.”

Nicholas Freudenberg, a distinguished professor of public health at the School of Public Health, said in an op-ed in Crain’s New York Business that federal cuts to CUNY research could be catastrophic.

“CUNY’s faculty study the city’s major health problems including cancer, COVID-19 infection, HIV/AIDS, climate and environmental threats, pregnancy-associated deaths and substance use,” he said. “After losing federal funding for his research on COVID, Denis Nash, a distinguished professor of epidemiology at CUNY, observed, ‘If these cuts continue, it will mean fewer opportunities for students to engage in cutting-edge research projects, fewer scientific breakthroughs and a diminished ability to address pressing public health challenges.’”