CM Maloney on CUNY Beyond and AI workforce alignment

Thank you so much.

I wanted to ask more about CUNY Beyond.

You mentioned that you're asking for $2.7 million for that program with a plan to expand to 19 undergraduate campuses by 2030.

I want to hear more about how investments in CUNY Beyond, in particular the AI Innovation Fund, are meeting the city's workforce needs and how you evaluate where you should be investing more with matching with employers.

Well, thank you for the question.

So, you know, CUNY Beyond is really going, when you take CUNY,

77% graduate debt-free, almost equal number, don't pay any tuition, incredibly affordable, great asset in our faculty.

So what we want is to build more on the human capital of our students as they think about careers.

So Beyond is about making sure that our students are thinking of being exposed to careers from day one when they get into a campus, right, and they can then contribute more.

We think that that differentiator, when we get to do that well, is going to be a driver of enrollment, right?

Parents and students are asking for places that are giving them better chances to connect with careers at the end of graduation.

So we really see it as what we owe to our students and a great tool.

to BFAP enrollment and to be responsive to the community of employers out there.

If we have, as the five pillars of CUNY Beyond have, more career-oriented curriculum, the AI component will be part of that, right?

Because we'll be looking at all the different majors and careers and how AI is...

Figuring that out in the marketplace is going to be coming to us in terms of upgraded curriculum,

more individuals from industry coming to teach as agents for our students and our students being also more active in paid internships and apprenticeships, right?

So all that should create students that are ready to meet the moment and that's why we are very bullish on CUNY Beyond as a key strategy for us moving forward.

And what are some of the metrics that you can share on job placement, earning potential by different segments like teachers, healthcare workers, technology professionals for CUNY Beyond program and the benefits that come from it?

So I'll be happy to provide you with details on what we have.

The other component is that we're trying to figure out what are the right metrics in terms of return of investment, right?

In terms of a student comes to CUNY, they participate in this process, right?

How do you really measure?

That element of success.

If you look at what most schools use now, it's very rudimentary data, right?

It's surveys going out to students, and we want to be a lot more scientific to be able to come back and really measure ourselves to make sure that we're delivering for the students.

But I can give you what we have now, which is mostly based on information that comes from the New York State Department of Labor, is what we use, and we'll be happy to provide that to you in any way that you...

Are interested in.

Could I ask one follow-up?

Okay, quickly, yes.