Queens needs a new deal for CUNY
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Kaleel Anderson represents Assembly district 31 Photo via NY Assembly
By Khaleel M. Anderson
Over 3,000 CUNY students live in the neighborhoods that I represent here in the 31st Assembly District of New York State. Some 56,000 CUNY students live in Queens as a whole. CUNY is vital to our community, but decades of underfunding and disinvestment have weakened this historic institution.
In 2019, New York Public Advocate Jumaane Williams reported that over 60% of CUNY students come from households earning less than $30,000 annually.
On one hand, this means that CUNY has the potential to - and often does - transform families providing a path to economic stability.
On the other hand, it means that CUNY students struggle - to survive, to stay enrolled, to complete their degrees. This is exactly why CUNY needs a New Deal: because investing in CUNY means investing in the financial stability of Queens families. When we invest in our future, students, data clearly shows we often see a return.
The New Deal for CUNY is proposed legislation (A5843/S4461) that would enhance CUNY services by ensuring adequate numbers of mental health counselors, academic advisors and full-time faculty, while also improving compensation for adjunct faculty - of which I was one until last year.
And the bill would make CUNY free for the residents of Queens and for all New Yorkers. As the current CUNY U.S.S. Chair Juvanie Piquant argues in the Gotham Gazette, CUNY was free for more than a century when our city was majority white. The decision to charge tuition for the first time in 1976 was and is racist. The New Deal for CUNY would overturn that poor political decision of the 1970s.
Investing in CUNY during an economic downturn is good economics, and it has historical precedent. The New York City Comptroller’s office recently reported that some 80% of CUNY graduates stay in New York, earning $28.6 billion more than they would have without their degrees and contributing more than $4 billion to the tax base of our state.
In the wake of the Great Depression, New York built three new CUNY campuses, Brooklyn College, Lehman College, and Queens College. The Works Progress Administration spent 18 million inflation-adjusted dollars to make Queens College a safer and more beautiful campus, and millions more improving our borough.
We can make such investments again, and we must if we want our community to flourish. The Center for an Urban Future recently reported a drastic disparity in educational attainment across New York City. Queens has the second-lowest rate of bachelor's degree attainment, and the situation in Far Rockaway and Rosedale, neighborhoods that I am elected to represent, is far worse. Across the city, Black and brown New Yorkers are far less likely to have a higher education degree than their white counterparts.
We can and must do better.
This is the moment to pass the New Deal for CUNY, to invest in the institution that serves poor and working-class Black and brown New Yorkers, here in Queens and across the region. It’s good economics to invest in CUNY, but it is also a matter of justice. Our communities deserve to live in dignity, with economic stability, and without the looming threat of financial ruin. CUNY is the vehicle to provide that stability.
Let’s make a decision that is at once rational and just, and pass the New Deal for CUNY. It’s good for Queens, and it’s good for New York.
Khaleel Anderson is an assemblymember representing southeast Queens District 31.
