The City University of New York is expanding an initiative to better connect college students to careers with the help of two new grants, CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez said in his State of the University address on Wednesday.
The program, called “CUNY Beyond,” integrates career preparation into academic programs. It’s growing from four to nine CUNY campuses this school year, thanks to $4 million from private donors and $6.8 million in state funding from Gov. Hochul, the chancellor announced during his fourth-annual speech. In total, CUNY Beyond is serving 125,000 students.
The new campuses are: Baruch College, City College of New York, Kingsborough Community College, Queensborough Community College, and York College.
“We are already seeing signs that the approach is taking hold,” Matos Rodríguez said at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan.
CUNY Beyond, one of the chancellor’s signature initiatives, launched last year at four colleges: Borough of Manhattan Community College, Hunter College, LaGuardia Community College and Lehman College.
The program was driven by an acknowledgement that only one in four college students uses their campus career center. Through CUNY Beyond, career services are made part of the traditional academic experience.
For example, an academic advisor does not just recommend courses to take for a major but also serves as a career counselor. CUNY campuses work directly with employers — such as Morgan Stanley, Google and Pfizer — to develop academic plans that align majors with career goals, and expand access to paid internships.
The new grants include $3.25 million from Ascendium Education Group to help train faculty and redesign freshmen orientation and seminars and $750,000 from ECMC Foundation to support advising, Matos Rodríguez said in his speech.
So far, nearly 200 CUNY faculty members have received training to embed career work in their teaching, and 250 majors have created “maps” of not only required courses and credits, but also specific career targets per semester. At the first four campuses, paid internship applications increased by 42% in the first year.
The chancellor has set a goal of expanding CUNY Beyond to all campuses in every undergraduate degree program by 2030.
“If you have ever heard me talk for more than two minutes, you know how passionate I am about paid internships,” Matos Rodríguez said. “These early results show that we are beginning to bridge the traditional divide between earning a degree and building a career.”