Today, I had the privilege of delivering my third annual State of the University address and unveiling CUNY Beyond, a comprehensive plan to prepare students across the University for success in their careers.

CUNY Beyond is the nation’s most sweeping effort to elevate and integrate a focus on career outcomes into every undergraduate degree. This work begins in our classrooms. As is the case nationally, only a quarter of CUNY students use our amazing campus career services, but all of them go to class. So instead of waiting for students to walk into a career center or attend a job fair, we are working with faculty peer leaders in every discipline to embed career touch points throughout their college experience, including their orientations, classes, and advising sessions.

We will also continue to grow our CUNY Career Success Fellows program, where faculty have taken the lead in embedding career-connected learning in their courses, showing the connections between the knowledge and skills developed in our classrooms and the indispensable abilities that today’s employers demand. By 2030, CUNY Beyond will impact 180,000 students each year and triple the number who participate in paid internships.

In addition, I was proud to announce that CUNY enrollment has grown 3.6% this year, preliminary figures show. This represents our third consecutive year-over-year increase. In total, we expect over 8,000 new students to have joined our University this fall, for a combined total of nearly 20,000 since 2022. In short, our momentum continues to be strong.

Below are some other highlights from my address:

  • This month, we emailed nearly 70,000 seniors personalized “Welcome to CUNY” letters, each listing the number of CUNY college credits they have already earned and inviting them to apply for free – starting this week – to one of our 19 undergraduate colleges. All seniors who graduate are guaranteed a spot at one of our excellent community colleges. This is the third year CUNY has partnered with the City public schools on the welcome letters.
  • Yesterday we issued a joint announcement with the Jobs CEO Council that nearly 10,000 CUNY students have been hired by the City’s largest private-sector employers during our five-year partnership.
  • CUNY now has over 120 AI-related initiatives, including YorkGPT, the City Tech AI Task Force, and the Baruch AI Think Tank, which serve campuses and communities alike. The School of Professional Studies offers a fully online Master’s in Generative AI, while BMCC launched CUNY’s first AI certificate program.
  • I also highlighted some of our flourishing high-impact research. City College, for example, partnered with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to develop a groundbreaking AI model that can detect breast cancer in MRI images potentially up to one year earlier.
  • We are continuing to upgrade across the University. Between the last fiscal year and this one, we invested about $850 million in facilities infrastructure improvements and expect to complete or substantially advance over 100 projects across the University.  

If you missed the address, you can watch a recording online or read the transcript, and I hope you will do so. We also showed this short video that celebrates the spirit of our students and the City we call home. 

The launch of CUNY Beyond, paired with our growing enrollment and exciting new academic and research developments, all point to a CUNY that has never been stronger.

That strength, of course, comes from our incredible community of individuals who collectively power our progress forward. Thank you for being part of CUNY’s ongoing story of opportunity and resilience, and the future we’re building together.

With gratitude,
Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, PhD