As my first academic year as Dean comes to a close, I am happy to report that we have begun to move the college toward a vision for New York’s Honors College. 2022–2023 has been a year of accomplishments and beginnings. A new leadership team is taking shape at the college and many high-impact initiatives have been funded and are launching or will be launching in the new year. As we begin the last phase of implementation of the Macaulay Strategic Plan 2020–2025, we look both backward at our accomplishments and forward to a bold vision for the next chapter of the college’s history. CUNY has unveiled its new strategic plan, CUNY Lifting New York, which dovetails with the Macaulay’s values, and brings even clearer focus to our continuing work to promote the four pillars of the existing plan: academic excellence, student success, community, and institutional and operational effectiveness.
Underpinning our work is the organizational and operational health of Macaulay, and three related themes needing immediate attention: 1) strengthening the college’s leadership structures, 2) developing external partnerships and securing funding for strategic initiatives, and 3) diversifying the college’s revenue streams. These tie together much of what we have accomplished this year and lay the groundwork for continued success in the coming year.
First, we have taken several steps to strengthen the college’s leadership structure to sharpen our focus on achieving college and university’s strategic goals, facilitate inclusion and belonging, and improve transparency across the consortium. With 14 members on the previous Macaulay Dean’s cabinet, most of whom were HEO Directors and Associate Directors, building a Senior Leadership Team composed of divisional leaders was of utmost importance. With three new Associate Deans joining the college in 2023, Macaulay will be organized into four administrative divisions: Academic Affairs, Student Success and Equity, Advancement and Communications, and Finance and Administration. The Associate Deans will provide leadership and strategic direction to their divisions, and are expected to pursue resources and realign divisional priorities. We have also created the Dean’s Advisory Council which will bring together, for the first time, representatives of important constituencies across the consortium, including campus Honors Directors, Macaulay Academic Advisors, students from the Scholars Council, faculty, and directors and managers at Macaulay central. The decision to create this structure was, in part, a response to the results of a Staff Survey administered in 2019 that indicated that staff were unclear about who had direct access to information and about the logic behind the composition of the Cabinet.
Second, we secured $6.2 million in funding from external partners for programmatic initiatives to advance the college’s strategic goals. These focus on expanding access to honors education, graduate school, and career pathways for low-income and underrepresented students; community wellness and resilience; and inclusion and belonging. These new program initiatives infuse the college with much-needed new resources, lift staff morale, improve the overall health of the organization, and expand access for additional cohorts of high achieving students.
Third, we have made significant strides in diversifying our revenue streams. In addition to these philanthropic gifts, we have secured grants from City Council and the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, ramped up our space rental with local entities such as ABC Studios and New Plaza Cinema, bringing our total non-tax levy revenue for the year to more than $8 million.
With new leadership in place and an infusion of programmatic resources, we are poised to begin a dialogue in the community around Renewing the Macaulay Vision, reaffirming Macaulay’s role as New York’s public honors college, educating in and for the public interest and serving as a launchpad for new generations of New York’s leaders.
At the heart of Macaulay’s mission lies the creation of outstanding learning experiences, in and out of the classroom, that cross the lines between disciplines, inspire students to think broadly, and prepare them to be leaders and changemakers in their chosen fields. New programs, as well as Macaulay’s signature Opportunities Fund, support students for whom cost might be a barrier to taking advantage of important experiential learning opportunities.
Joining the college’s leadership this year is Dr. Roblin Meeks, who has an impressively rich, twenty-year record of progressive academic, administrative, and leadership experience in diverse higher education settings, including previous executive leadership appointments at two CUNY colleges.
Over the course of his career, he has built a record of achievements in the design, development, and implementation of a wide variety of academic programs serving undergraduate and graduate students, adults, and professionals, accomplished through careful attention to the needs of the populations he has served. He has a pragmatic data-driven approach to administration and a clear vision of the power of higher education, especially public higher education, to have a positive, transformative impact on students and their communities.
Under the leadership of Dr. Meeks, Academic Affairs will renew its focus on student learning and academic success—or as he puts it “the school part of the school.” He will oversee the transition of Academic Advising into Academic Affairs including the creation of a new Director of Academic Advising position. He will also be responsible for the implementation of several of our new strategic initiatives, notably the Gray STEM Scholars and Friedman Transfer Scholars programs.
With an investment of $1.86 million over 5 years from the Gray Foundation, Macaulay will develop a STEM research mentoring program to improve success in graduate school, particularly for low income, first generation, and underrepresented students in graduate and medical school. This project, inspired by the successful Meyerhoff Scholars developed at University of Maryland – Baltimore County (UMBC), will also uniquely introduce as program partners John Jay College’s successful PRISM Undergraduate Research Program and Mount Sinai Institute for Health Equity Research to Macaulay. Learn more about the Gray STEM Scholars program.
Study Abroad and Study Away came roaring back this year with 156 students traveling to 26 different countries on 6 continents to study everything from Art and Architecture, Economics, Public Health, and Tropical Ecology, to Innovation and Platform Strategies in the Service Industry. Of these students, 67 secured competitive enhanced opportunities funds awards for their programs.
We are making strides toward our goal of increasing the number of employer-paid internships by 2025. The number of employer-paid internships posted in Handshake grew this year from 4,300 to 9,113 and the number of students participating in employer-paid internships grew marginally from 253 to 261. However, because overall internship numbers dropped from 538 to 479, this represents an 8 percentage point increase in the portion of internships that are employer paid. This decrease in overall numbers is made up of Opportunities Fund Internships and unpaid internships, which were down from 175 to 147. Taken together with the dramatic increase in study abroad participation, we understand this as a rebalancing following the COVID disruptions of experiential learning.
To reach our target of 375 opportunities by 2025, we partnered with the Hospital for Special Surgery, the Legal Aid Society and the 9/11 Museum to offer opportunities for rising sophomores and rising juniors. Lastly, we received an investment of $499,063 over 18 months to launch the “CUNY Honors Business Hub” to enhance career services for Honors business majors who may not have awareness or preparation for the range of business careers available to them following graduation.
With an investment of $300,000 over two years from the Booth Ferris Foundation, we will engage Lightcast, an organization specializing in compiling employment information from multiple public sources. Lightcast has access to real-time data from over 40,000 sources, contributing to a database with over 1 billion job postings and billions of other data points, which, combined with curated input from dozens of other statistical sources provides the most complete view possible of the fast-changing labor market. With the robust information gained on the employment outcomes of our alumni, we will engage Opportunity Network, specializing in career fluency curriculum, to work with our Career Services team and our academic advisors to enhance our career preparation programming.
As the Honors College of the largest urban university system in the country, Macaulay is committed to upholding the principles on which we were founded—the promise of CUNY to provide a first-rate education to all students, especially New Yorkers who are the first in their families to go to college and those who come from low-income backgrounds.
This year we saw fewer overall applications to Macaulay, but we were nonetheless successful in increasing the percentage of applications from low income and first-generation students by continuing our targeted outreach to new-to-us New York City high Schools.
As we emerge from the pandemic era and continue test-optional admissions, we are establishing new baselines for the different segments of our enrollment funnel. With support from the Gray Foundation, we have engaged a strategic enrollment management consultant to provide guidance to help us formulate new strategies for robust high school pipelines for students majoring in STEM and public health. This work is ongoing.
To supercharge our focus on student success for the years ahead, we created the new position of Associate Dean for Student Success and Equity to deepen synergies between student services and enrollment management; to champion the college’s efforts to enhance inclusion and belonging; and to realize Macaulay’s vision to attract and nurture students who represent the full diversity of CUNY and New York City.
There are three strategies for increasing access for high achieving students: expanding the top of our freshman enrollment funnel through new relationships with New York City high schools and expanded social media marketing; piloting new career success programs for STEM, Business, and Public Policy majors, and institutionalizing a transfer pathway from the CUNY community colleges, described in greater detail below.
Macaulay continues to have some of the highest graduation rates among honors colleges nationally. However, we believe there is always room to improve. This year we began a multi-year examination of factors that contribute to academic challenges faced by students through a systematic collection of qualitative data during the college’s academic review process. We will use the results to inform programmatic responses and to continue improving student outcomes. We also began a process to update and clarify academic policies to better support student success while upholding our high academic standards.
We have just welcomed our third pilot cohort of the Bridge Scholars Program with 15 students from Borough of Manhattan Community College to John Jay College and this year we secured the remainder of the funding necessary for the fourth and final cohort, which will be admitted in 2024.
With an investment of $120,595 over 2 years from the Ichigo Foundation, we have secured the support required for the fourth and final pilot cohort of the Macaulay Bridge Scholars Program. The Bridge Scholars program is an essential component of our efforts to expand access to Macaulay. This one-time gift will support the cohort of 20 students transferring from Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) to Baruch College through their entire time in the program.
Based on the resounding success of our Bridge Scholars programs at other campuses over the past few years, we have begun planning to expand and institutionalize transfer pathways from all 7 community colleges. With an investment of $2.76 million over 5 years from the Friedman Family Foundation, we will launch the Friedman Transfer Scholars Program to increase the capacity from 20 students to 175 students by 2028.
Macaulay is at the heart of a vibrant and expansive network. We work to foster deep connections among our community of scholars, in our neighborhood, across CUNY, and throughout New York City. Macaulay is a model of the transformative power of community, where students learn first-hand about care and resilience, preparing them to address significant global challenges through collaboration.
Macaulay’s Wellness Center, with two full-time clinicians, has never had to turn away a student despite being very near capacity. We succeeded in maintaining this record of serving 100% of students seeking services through a blend of individual counseling, workshops and group sessions, and wellness presentations.
| Service | Students Served |
|---|---|
| Individual counseling | 149 students |
| Workshops and group sessions | 111 students |
| Wellness 101 presentations | 580 students |
With an investment of $400,000 over 2 years from the Aronson Family Foundation, we will improve, enhance, and expand our wellness programming across our eight partner campuses as part of a larger strategy to redesign our health, wellness, and resiliency offerings, particularly in response to the challenges our community continues to face because of the pandemic. The JED Foundation will partner with us throughout the project from the initial stages of mapping student needs and our current services through to program implementation and assessment.
We are grateful to have received funding from the CUNY Office of Transformation this year with which we were able to put into action a number of the recommendations made by the college’s DEI Advisory Group in its 2022 report. This funding supported an array of events on all the partner campuses and at 67th Street. Over 440 students, faculty, and staff attended events including discussions on envisioning an Inclusive Honors College; a talkback with Linda Villarosa, CCNY Faculty and author of Under the Skin; Cultural Celebrations that included music, games and food from around the world; and implicit bias and microaggression trainings for faculty and staff. These events helped lay the foundation for the work from which grew the JFEW and GS Humane grants described below.
DEI Advisory Group recommendations include that the college should provide anti-racism training to faculty and staff. This funding enabled us to provide 4 workshops on combatting implicit bias and microaggressions at 67th Street that drew over 45 faculty and staff, including 100% of the college’s senior and managerial leadership.
Recommendations also include enhancing student involvement in anti-bias/anti-hate events and activities. Two of the funded student events at 67th Street, a Diversity Reception and a Supporting Excellence Conference, helped build community for students who are committed to a more just and peaceful world.
Another DEI Advisory Group recommendation that came to fruition this year was a DEI Resource Hub for students. With input from key stakeholders including the Graduate Center’s Title IX Office, Macaulay Scholars Council, Macaulay Diversity Initiative, and the DEI Advisory Group, we published this curated list of resources to help students expand their knowledge, engage with the community, and locate support. The launch was communicated to students, honors directors, and advisors on the campuses. The Resource Hub will be maintained by the DEI Advisory Group so that it remains up to date.
With an investment of $91,747 over 18 months from the Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women, we will conduct a multi-method assessment of the financial, cultural, and social needs of Jewish students at Macaulay Honors College. We will use the information to explore opportunities to improve programming across all eight of the consortial colleges. As religious identity has not traditionally been included in university demographic data and climate surveys are of limited scope, we are partnering with research experts at Qualtrics Higher Education to guide the development of this effort.
This investment of $178,296 over 3 years from GS Humane will provide trainings and events to develop Restorative Practices across the eight campuses and at Macaulay central. Current policies at the campus level are important for addressing formal complaints, but often don’t help repair harm, reset relationships, and restore trust, when community members have experiences or encounters that adversely affect school climate even if they do not result in college investigations. Restorative Practices build belonging and respond to harm, equipping students and professional staff with skills to ensure that conflicts and problems can be pre-empted or collaboratively worked out.
Our alumni remain active and engaged in the Macaulay community as both donors and mentors to current students. We relaunched our alumni mentoring program this year, which was paused during the pandemic, and hosted 28 alumni mentors for 48 students. To increase engagement, we launched an alumni survey aimed at learning what kinds of events and activities alumni find most useful. This year, we welcomed a new alumni board member, Dr. Sachin Shah, who was one of the first graduates of the college. 90 Alumni attended the Alumni Fall Fête and our Alumni LinkedIn group grew to 1,124 members.
In this pivotal moment for higher education, colleges must engage in disciplined self-reflection and apply creative strategies to sustain their missions. Macaulay is strengthening its assessment practices and diversifying its revenue streams to ensure that we make sound choices in the investment of our resources.
Macaulay’s Foundation Board set an ambitious goal for the May 2023 Gala and they exceeded this goal by a significant margin, raising $700,000 for the Opportunities Fund and special programs. With additional philanthropy, the Foundation received $2.2 million in gifts. When combined with the programmatic investments in the 2020–2025 Strategic Plan described, our non-tax levy funds raised in 2023 surpassed $8 Million.
We also received $10,000 in discretionary funding from the New York City Council member Gale Brewer to support the expansion of the college’s leadership of the annual City Nature Challenge, taking place in April, 2024. Macaulay has been the lead organizer of the New York City segment of City Nature Challenge since 2017. The Challenge is a global, four-day celebration of biodiversity, citizen science, and sustainability, centered around making nature observations on your own or at free local events. Nature lovers of all ages are invited to participate in green spaces, parks or wherever they find nature throughout New York City’s five boroughs. The discretionary funding will allow Macaulay to offer City Nature Challenge experiences to many more New Yorkers.
New Plaza Cinema renewed its space rental contract for another year. In addition to being a source of revenue, the relationship with New Plaza is expanding. In 2023-2024 academic year, they will be a key partner in the revival of the CUNY Film Festival, co-curating a component of the college’s LGBTQIA+ programming made possible by funding from the CUNY LGBTQIA+ Consortium.
To expand our ability to rent building space, we have established a partnership with John Jay wherein they will advertise and contract Macaulay facilities for rental as part of their space rental program.
The Office of Institutional Strategy and Planning was launched this year and has begun to restore the college’s planning and assessment capacity. We successfully implemented a new process for reporting throughout the year on strategic plan progress and outcomes, and a new system for tracking and collecting data from the student academic review process. After a homegrown database for tracking student data was taken offline because it could not be brought into compliance with security requirements, we have begun to make better use of existing CUNY tools and engaging campus Directors and Registrars in clarifying data definitions and normalizing data practices across the consortium. Data dashboards that were several years out of date have been replaced with updated Fact Sheets while a plan to reorganize the dashboards is developed. The college’s Assessment Committee, which had been dormant for a time, reconvened and will soon begin development of a new college-wide assessment plan.
The digital landscape is evolving rapidly, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, and so are the tools and platforms that enhance online learning. At the same time, patterns of collaboration across the consortium have changed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and virtual spaces have become permanent features of the ways we work and learn.
The Macaulay building serves as the social and intellectual hub of the Macaulay consortium, yet we do not have technology in our classrooms or large spaces that can support hybrid meetings, seminars, or activities. Thus, this year, we sought funding to begin upgrading technology in the Macaulay building to better support hybrid collaboration.
With a first infusion of capital funding from the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, we will begin to upgrade computers and servers and to install video conferencing equipment that will add to the building’s capacity to function as a digital hub for the consortium.
This component involves upgrading the hardware, securing licenses, and help with the transfer to the new server, including installation.
To make hybrid live/virtual collaboration spaces possible, we will begin to install all-in-one video conferencing hardware and software, such as that offered by DTEN and Zoom Rooms.
Many of the desktop computers at the College will soon sunset as they will not be compatible with software upgrades in the coming year. We will replace the desktops with laptops for 60 staff members and faculty providing services to students.
Our Office of Finance and Administration, led by Associate Dean Chris Dennis, has been hard at work on a program of repairs and upgrades to the Macaulay building.
Thanks to the Finance and Administration team, we have a working elevator again after an outage of several months, over which time we learned that a full modernization of the elevator is necessary. Funding for the modernization has now been secured and the work is set to begin next year.
Also this year, we kicked off a project to replace outdated lighting throughout the building with energy efficient LEDs, which will improve safety and working conditions in the building and reduce energy costs.
Finally, plans have been drawn up to renovate the two lower levels of the building into flexible, student-centered spaces that will facilitate varied social and academic activities, as well as provide additional rentable space. We eagerly look forward to this project being fully funded.
As we head into the 2023–2024 academic year, we are pleased with the accomplishments of the past year and excited about the work that lies ahead. With the changes we have made so far, we begin the new year well positioned to articulate a clear vision for Macaulay’s next phase and to begin working toward our next strategic plan, in close alignment with CUNY Lifting New York.
