Opinion

Learn from CUNY

That Forbes recently ranked City College as the top public college in New York is just the most recent testament to the excellence at various campuses of the City University of New York — and only the latest sign of the successes CUNY achieved in Matthew Goldstein’s 14 years as chancellor.

Yet there’s more to be learned from those successes than even the most well-deserved accolades have captured. Seen in full, the Goldstein era at CUNY offers a template for change that elected city officials would do well to study if they mean to improve the well-being of New York’s citizens, especially the neediest among them.

In my view, there were five essential ingredients in the Goldstein strategy.

First, a strategic vision of what needed to be done. In Goldstein’s case, that vision had already been laid out in the multivolume study “An Institution Adrift,” the work of a task force established by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and chaired by former Yale President Benno Schmidt.

By 1999, the report on how to turn around CUNY’s then-alarming conditions — high dropout and low graduation rates, a disproportionate number of academically unqualified students, a dysfunctional system of governance and more — had been approved for implementation by the board.

Second, and no less crucially: a commitment by all key elected officials to support the strategic vision. Resisting any temptation to play politics, Mayor Giuliani and then-Gov. George Pataki were on board with the strategy’s broad elements from the first, as, in later years, were Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo. Even more strongly committed was Herman Badillo, the former US congressman then serving as chairman of CUNY’s board of trustees.

The third requisite was a strong-minded executive with the courage to make unpopular decisions. This is where Goldstein came in.

In 1999, 87 percent of students admitted to the university’s two-year colleges, and 72 percent of those admitted to its four-year colleges, had failed one or more of the university’s placement tests — whose purpose was to determine if a student could read, write and understand math at an average high-school level. Immediately on becoming chancellor that year, Goldstein got the Board of Regents to support a new policy that would cease to provide remedial education for incoming students at the senior four-year colleges. That move ended the disastrous open-admissions era at CUNY.

Reinforcing this initiative — and yielding dramatically positive results — was, fourth, an emphasis on excellence at every level and in every area of the institution.

Over the years, entering SAT scores at the most selective of CUNY’s colleges rose some 150 points on average. Simultaneously, Goldstein was able to hire almost 3,000 new faculty. In the last five years alone, the university has produced 40 Fulbright scholars, 58 National Science Foundation fellows, seven Truman scholars, and four Rhodes scholars. The number of PhDs awarded has more than doubled, from 230 in Goldstein’s first year to almost 500 in 2011-12.

Among the chancellor’s boldest moves in this area was the startup of highly reputed new schools of journalism and public health. Most important, the new Macaulay Honors College offers full-tuition, four-year scholarships to the best and brightest of New York’s high-school graduates. To date, the combined average SAT score of Macaulay’s entering students stands at an impressive 1,382 (out of a possible 1,600) points.

Finally, Goldstein understood that in addition to support from the city and state, CUNY needed to tap private philanthropy — not only for what such new funding would allow the school to accomplish, but also as a magnet to attract other potential donors.

At the start of his tenure, private donors accounted for $50 million a year on average. The university’s current fund-raising campaign has raised $1.2 billion in record time, and is on track to raise $3 billion by its self-imposed deadline.

The cumulative effect of these five ingredients has had enormous impact on New York City and its citizens. Goldstein’s tenure has shown not only that city schools can be operated at the highest intellectual level but also that, just as they did so legendarily in the past, they can function today as engines of upward mobility for untold numbers of our neediest and our newest.

A final group of statistics tells the story: Today, two-thirds of the students at the CUNY senior colleges have foreign-born parents and come from non-English-speaking homes; some 40 percent are the first generation to attend college, and half have needed to work while attending school.

One can imagine no higher tribute to the outgoing chancellor’s accomplishment and no greater longterm gift to all New Yorkers than the adoption by other city and state agencies of the same strategies that fueled his success and their implementation with the same concentrated energy, focus, and intelligence.

Roger Hertog is president of the Hertog Foundation and chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute.