SUNY Releases 2012 Report Card

Job Creation, Improvements to the Education Pipeline on the Rise

Albany – The State University of New York today released its 2012 Report Card, which includes data from SUNY’s baseline year of reporting (2008-09) and subsequent years, enabling the system’s stakeholders and members of the public to measure SUNY’s progress toward its goals for the university system and for New York State.

“The State University of New York is the public’s university,” said SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher. “With our strategic plan, we have made a commitment to all New Yorkers to create jobs, improve education from cradle to career, reduce our carbon footprint, and much more as we aim to drive economic development and improve the quality of life throughout our great state. The annually published SUNY Report Card is our way of being transparent about our progress and allowing the public to hold us accountable for it. We are proud to release this most recent edition today.”

Two areas in which SUNY has made significant progress since 2008-09 are job creation and sealing the leaks in the education pipeline through a number of rapidly expanding initiatives.

SUNY has created 790 new jobs through its federally-sponsored research programs this year, a 14.7 percent increase since 2008-09. The jobs created estimate is based on STAR METRICS: Science and Technology for America's Reinvestment: Measuring the Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science, which takes into account the number of faculty conducting research, collaboration with partnering institutions and vendors, and institutional support staff who are employed as a result of federal research grants.

Additionally, the system’s focus on sealing the leaks in the education pipeline by partnering with schools and communities statewide to collaboratively approach education from cradle to career have been widely embraced across the state.

SUNY is an important partner in cradle-to-career networks that have formed throughout New York, in Albany, Clinton County, Harlem, Rochester, and Queens. In addition, many other neighborhoods in the State have expressed interest in pursuing this major education reform initiative. Three of these sites (Albany, Clinton, Rochester) qualify for membership in the Strive National Network, a Report Card metric.

Nine SUNY campuses this year launched and expanded cooperative education programs in coordination with the system’s SUNY Works initiative, which aims to bring co-op to every campus. As part of the program, SUNY colleges have established partnerships with local businesses and employers to formally integrate academic coursework with paid, on-the-job work experience in the students’ field of study. Current business partners include: Global Foundries, General Electric, IBM, Motorola, and Chevron.

SUNY now operates two new graduate level Urban Rural Teachers Corps pilot programs, which are funded through New York’s Race To The Top grant and offer teacher training more akin to the clinical training that medical professionals receive, as recommended by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning in 2010. The program also ensures that students who participate are placed in New York’s “high-need” school districts and remain in-state. These programs are located at the University at Albany and SUNY Oswego. Recently, SUNY Cortland and SUNY Oswego were awarded nearly $1 million in additional Race To The Top funding to launch undergraduate clinically-rich teacher education pilot programs.

Finally, 964 students received college-level credits in Early Colleges High Schools in 2010-11, a nearly 400 percent increase since 2008-09 in which 193 students received credit. SUNY is providing leadership on 23 Early College High Schools across the state and SUNY campuses are partners in 18 Smart Scholars Early College High Schools, which allow students to successfully graduate from high school without the need for remediation while simultaneously earning college credit. This improves the retention and graduation of these students, shortens their time-to-degree, and saves them money.

The SUNY Report Card is broken out into three sections to reflect the system’s organizational commitment to building a more Competitive SUNY, driving an increasingly Competitive New York and ensuring that Diversity Counts as the system pursues each of its goals.

For this third edition of the Report Card, SUNY has gone digital, beginning to provide its most critical data in a user-friendly and more accessible format. The first section – A Competitive SUNY – is delivered online using an interactive dashboard of metrics and accompanying data. The two remaining sections, which will be delivered online in later editions, are currently delivered in PDF format with data organized to appear similar to the online dashboard.

Both versions can be accessed at www.suny.edu/powerofsuny/reportcard

The Report Card is issued in advance of SUNY’s second annual Critical Issues in Higher Education Conference, which will be held this week in New York City and has attracted more than 400 education, business and industry officials from across the globe.

The SUNY Report Card provides a level of public accountability and transparency that New Yorkers - and most Americans - have never seen from public or private institutions of higher education. Chancellor Zimpher urged Report Card users to also view the system’s two previous report cards and its strategic plan, in order to get the broadest perspective and full appreciation of how far SUNY has come.

About the State University of New York

The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive university system in the United States, educating approximately 468,000 students in more than 7,500 degree and certificate programs on 64 campuses with nearly 3 million alumni around the globe. To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunity, visit www.suny.edu.