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Eight CUNY colleges have been recognized for their cost efficiency among the Forbes 2023 listing of “25 Colleges That Deliver a High Bang for Your Tuition Buck.” The colleges were lauded for their excellence through a variety of metrics including median salaries six years after graduation, discipline variety, average loan repayment time and tuition cost.
The CUNY colleges making the list are: College of Staten Island (3), Lehman College (11), Brooklyn College (14), John Jay College of Criminal Justice (15), The City College of New York (18), Baruch College (19), Queens College (20) and Hunter College (22), all of which placed ahead of some of the nation’s top private colleges – Harvard (23), Princeton (24) and Stanford (25).
“CUNY colleges are uniquely equipped to provide an affordable, academically rigorous education that prepares students for the successful outcomes they are seeking,” said CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “We take seriously our role to represent and serve New York City and its diverse population, and this ranking is a reminder of the extraordinary impact of this University’s guiding mission.”
To develop the list, Forbes looked at how long it takes for students to earn back the out-of-pocket costs of their degree. Forbes considered colleges whose graduates are not excessively burdened with student debt. In this, the outlet specifically calls out the CUNY colleges as offering its students, “degrees that will net them a post-graduate earnings boost over their peers with high school diplomas for little, if any, student debt.”
The formula used by Forbes to calculate the time to earn back the out-of-pocket costs of a degree was developed by Third Way, a think tank that last year named 10 CUNY senior colleges among the best in the nation for facilitating economic mobility. The calculation compares a student’s post-graduate earnings to what they would otherwise earn without the college degree.
According to Forbes, graduates with Hunter, Baruch and City College degrees earn back the cost of their diploma in just four months. Brooklyn College graduates take five months, while at Lehman, John Jay and Queens College, the expected time is just over half a year; College of Staten Island graduates are making back the cost of their degrees in just over 15 months.
Community Colleges Shine
In a nod to the quality and affordability of the University’s community colleges, WalletHub’s 2023 list of best community colleges in New York State includes all seven CUNY two-year schools, including Queensborough Community College as number one. The New York State list also spotlights Guttman (3), LaGuardia (5), Borough of Manhattan Community College (9), Kingsborough (10), Hostos (11) and Bronx Community College (17).
Repeated Recognition
These listings are the latest to tout the great value of a CUNY degree. Earlier this year, CUNY schools featured prominently in an interactive college ranking, created by the New York Times, that allowed users to prioritize such factors as high earnings, academic profile, economic mobility, low sticker price, low net price, racial diversity and economic diversity. The Princeton Review recently named five CUNY colleges among the nation’s best 389 four-year colleges, including placements among the “Best Value Colleges.”
The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving over 226,000 undergraduate and graduate students and awarding 55,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “Genius” Grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background. To learn more about CUNY, visit https://www.cuny.edu.
