CM Morano on metrics for judging CUNY outcomes

Thank you.

Chancellor, thank you for your testimony.

Thank you for keeping it on the brief side, but chock full of information.

We've heard from a lot of other folks in these hearings that have much longer testimony, but shockingly much less information.

So my compliments.

Your testimony highlights enrollment growth, retention gains, internship expansion, workforce development, AI initiatives, and several requests for additional funding.

If we come back here three years from now, what are the three metrics you would want taxpayers to judge CUNY by?

Oof.

Thank you for that question.

Sure.

I mean, enrollment growth and retention are vital to the fiscal health of the university, and we are in a budget hearing, so I will highlight that.

There's also human people with degrees and human capital going to make our city great and stuff, so I think that that is a key measurement.

That's what we led with enrollment.

We are really focused on rethinking and CUNY Beyond is that the way that from the get-go we work with our students in having them be exposed and thinking about careers.

It's not about forcing anybody to do anything they don't want to do.

It's opening the doors of opportunity and then having curriculum, courses, opportunities that allow you to be exploring things earlier and then transitioning in an easier way

into the workforce, right?

And I think that the nation is asking all of us to be doing that for the students.

And we need your partnership on the capital side.

So with those three that you mentioned, retention, enrollment, and career success, and capital.

Would you support publishing those metrics annually in a simple public dashboard so taxpayers can see whether the investments they're making are actually producing the outcomes that are promised?

So I would say that many of those metrics are public.

available in our website now, and maybe there's a way in which we can be more direct and focused.

I think if I'm getting a gist of your question, it'd be in that direction.

Our enrollment, graduation, retention data is, I'm making sure with the provost here, available on the website.

We are actually

working on what are the right metrics to be thinking about career success, right?

So we'll welcome feedback on that.

And then our information on the capital projects and all of that, it's also available on the website.

If there's suggestions about how to do that differently, always welcome to that.