CUNY is ranked first in “The Rankings That Matter”
The New York Times has released a new interactive tool that enables prospective students to choose their preferred institutions based on the criteria they value most. The New York Daily News applauded CUNY’s excellent top rankings in this tool. When you combine affordability, economic mobility, incomes, and socioeconomic diversity—categories that the Daily News determined to be crucial measures that genuinely matter for students and graduates—CUNY universities consistently rank near the top of the nation. The editorial also lauded CUNY’s excellent tax-dollar return on investment.
The editorial’s full content is available here and can be read below.
The CUNY Advantage: CUNY Places First in The Rankings That Matter
There has been a lot of concern regarding college rankings, including challenges to the dominance of the U.S. News & World Report methodology and essential list, spectacular controversies over false school data, and university announcements that they will no longer participate in the rankings at all. That’s even before we get to the ideological conflicts over issues like a school’s tolerance for free speech or its preference for sports over academics.
However, some schools are still superior than others in a variety of ways; how can this be determined? Concentrate on going back to the fundamentals and identifying what precisely makes a school effective. Academic rigor and the capacity to foster critical and creative thinking are essential but difficult to assess. parameters like cost of attendance and economic mobility are areas where we can definably look at cold, hard data, and on those parameters, our own City University system dominates the competition.
For the most recent confirmation, which comes in the form of a handy online tool that generates rankings based on the weighting of various factors, we can thank our friends and occasionally adversaries at The New York Times opinion page. In any combination that emphasizes factors like earnings, mobility, net price, and economic diversity, CUNY schools appear multiple times in the top ten, with Baruch, City College, and Hunter leading the pack.
On this page, we frequently question public expenditures in an effort to hold the government responsible for the value we receive for our tax dollars. That entails chastising leaders when that return is low and applauding them when we’re really getting a lot for our money. This analysis is not the first to find that CUNY schools are outperforming the national average in some of the metrics that are most important to students and graduates.
This should be kept in mind while policymakers consider the system’s budget. Every dollar that comes in gets multiplied and helps to keep New York’s economy booming.
