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Sanjana Ahmed

Cracks in CUNY's Crown Jewel


Touted as one of the best colleges for upward mobility in 2023 by financial news site 24/7 Wall St., Hunter College has been referred to as the “Crown Jewel of CUNY” by the Princeton Review. However, there is a lack of data to support such a title, and students of the school claim that it is not the college that is the reason for their success, but rather their own efforts.


One of the biggest hurdles Dean of Academic Innovation and Outcomes Robert Domanski has faced in his role is that Hunter lacks data on the employment and internship rates of its graduates and current students, making it difficult to gauge where the most help was needed. He says that this “wasn’t a total shock because most colleges don’t collect that data.” However, he emphasizes that it is something his office is working on as baseline data will be needed to determine if the programs being implemented are successful or not. 


Although the institution itself did not collect employment and internship data, 24/7 Wall St. was able to find certain metrics to award the school a place on the list of the best colleges for upward mobility. Specifically, they utilized information from the U.S. Department of Education, on the median incomes of Hunter alumni 10 years after their graduation and then compared it to their median family income in college. 


According to 24/7 Wall St., Hunter graduates generally earn at least twice as much as the typical household of an undergraduate student at the school based on the data. Though this may be an indicator of overall success, current Hunter students and alumni expressed that the school itself did not have much to do with their own achievements.


“It’s definitely a school where you have to make the most out of it,” says senior Fatima Tariq. “You have to take the initiative and look into resources yourself since they’re not really easy to find through the school.”


As a student on the pre-medical track, Tariq has had her share of involvement with resources on campus, namely the pre-health office. 


With many students vying for coveted spots in competitive academic institutions, the pre-health office and advisors are meant to assist students on their journey to entering their chosen healthcare career, according to their website


However, that does not mean all of the students who visit their office have a good experience or outcome. 


“We got into the meeting and she was very dismissive of my questions,” says Tariq of a previous advisor. Soon after she sat down, Tariq says that another advisor interrupted the meeting and began talking about the details of other students’ applications, including their names. 


This all took place about one week after Tariq’s family home in Jamaica, Queens, burned down. Even though she and her family were still living out of a hotel at the time and processing the whole ordeal in its aftermath, she went to Hunter’s main campus since she knew it would be difficult to get another appointment. 


“We have to make these appointments months in advance because they fill out so quickly,” Tariq says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to get another appointment for months now.’”


Along with the high demand for appointments, the lack of support and access to resources from the office is likely only exacerbated by “the sheer lack of advisors,” Tariq said. With only two senior advisors and one new advisor catering to hundreds of pre-health students, the advisor-to-student ratio is extremely low. 


This is not just a problem specific to the school’s pre-health office.


“I think that the advisor situation at Hunter really needs work,” says alumna Nora Wesson, who majored in journalism with a minor in public health. 


“When you go on a tour as a high school student, they’re like, ‘Yeah, every student has an advisor who you can ask for advice, help you with all of the bureaucratic processes, and help you really navigate finding your major,’” Wesson says. “That was not my experience.”


Like all other students at the school, Wesson was assigned a general academic advisor prior to declaring her major whose main purpose was to help students sign up for their classes. Recalling how advisor and advisee relationships were advertised to her as a high school student, Wesson said that she was given the impression that they were typically much closer relationships than what she had later experienced. 


Adding on to that, Wesson notes how difficult it was to even meet with her advisor. “You’ve got 10 minutes to talk to her and that’s it,” says Wesson of meeting with her general advisor. 


Wesson said that one of the main issues that resulted from this was having to navigate the school’s, at the time, outdated class scheduling system and class catalog. 


“I felt kind of just thrown into the deep end without a life jacket,” says Wesson.


She experienced a sudden and positive shift after declaring her journalism major and getting assigned an advisor within the department. Wesson described the change as overwhelmingly positive. “Suddenly I had someone who knew the program I wanted,” she says, “and what kind of classes I would need to take.”


When Wesson declared her major in 2021, Hunter College’s journalism program had 69 majors, according to the school’s 2023 Fact Book. Journalism Program Director Sissel McCarthy is the program’s only advisor. For the 2024 spring semester, she advised 65 journalism majors and 45 minors.


Wesson says she also had difficulties accessing resources offered by the school, specifically when it came to tutoring. “Scheduling was really difficult,” she says. 


The tutoring program offered by the school was run by students for students. With such busy and conflicting schedules, Wesson says it was difficult to find time to actually meet with a tutor even once she was able to be paired up with one. 


Resources offered up by the school run into this issue with scheduling due to many being operated by students for students, such as the Skirball Science Learning Center, the Rockowitz Writing Center, and various peer mentoring programs across the campus. 


Some students reported that sometimes the problem is not even the lack of resources on campus, but rather the lack of advertising about them. 


Hunter alumna Mohuya Khan graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in biology in 

2020. She later obtained a master’s degree in childhood education from the school. Now working as a fashion designer and small business owner, she said that she had barely known about extracurricular activities relating to her interests or major while at the school. 


The only way I was able to find out about clubs or events was through flyers, but I also didn't think there were an adequate amount of resources or available opportunities for me,” Khan says. 


Flyers for club events are not as prevalent as they may be at other schools. Students must receive approval from the Office of Student Activities to post flyers and advertisements, and only in specific locations that students are made aware of via a newsletter sent out to student leaders. With students rushing from one class to another, the flyers can be easily missed.


As a shy person, Khan would not typically reach out to ask for help but only did so when absolutely necessary, especially when it came to meeting with her advisor as she “tried to avoid it considering it always felt unhelpful and inconvenient.” 


Khan credits her success after graduation to her own efforts rather than anything she garnered from the school, particularly as she ultimately chose not to pursue a career relating to her degree. 


Lauren Hakimi, who graduated  in 2022 with a double major in English and history, also notes how difficult it was to find opportunities at the school. She did two unpaid internships and Hunter provided stipends for both. One was through the Office of the Arts and the other was through the President’s Office, she says.


Hakimi says she found out about those two opportunities through her own research. She discovered information about the internships by “looking at the LinkedIn Profiles of every single person that had gone to Hunter.” 


In her free time, she recalls spending a great deal of it on LinkedIn, scrolling through the profiles of older students and alumni to see what opportunities they were able to take part in. “This was me at 2 a. m., lying in my bed with my laptop in my lap,” Hakimi says. “I think it was purely motivated by anxiety.”


Citing the typical stereotype that English and history majors do not have much luck in the job market, Hakimi says she felt that it pushed her to want to do more. 


Recalling the advice given to her by a Macaulay Honors College advisor to just relax and get a singular internship, Hakimi says that students should go against that advice and pursue as many opportunities as they are able to. “Unfortunately, one internship does not guarantee you success in your career, at least not immediately upon graduation,” she says. 


The lack of accessible information on resources at Hunter is well-known by its faculty. Domanski says that information regarding programs and other resources available to students does not “exist at least in a very clear way, or in a centralized place.” He recognizes the hurdles students have to overcome to even find out about things that are available to them and wants to find a solution, “so as a student, you don’t have to navigate every single department looking for these different programs you’ve heard about,” he says. 


Domanski also acknowledges that money plays a role in facilitating these efforts. “It’s something that if I can raise some money for, I can probably make,” he says. As of now, he says that he would recommend that students reach out to their individual department chairs for information applicable to their interests. 


Delving further into the hurdles Hunter faces when trying to uplift its students, Domanski identifies budgets as a major factor. “There’s different types of funding that legally are allowed to fund or not fund different types of projects,” he says. This means that even if the school came into more money, based on where that funding came from and what parameters were given along with it would dictate what could be done with it.


Domanski acknowledges that there is a substantial difference between the number of faculty at the college and the number of students enrolled, though he maintains that “I don’t think it’s unique to Hunter.” He believes the solution to the problem is not necessarily hiring more faculty, but rather “how can we use resources we already have here on campus and kind of reimagine them in ways that better support students on the career side.” 


Specifically addressing the matter of advisors being unable to efficiently work with students, Domanski explains that most of their job requirements are to handle academic advising, such as helping students enroll in the classes they need to take to graduate. Domanski says that during the spring semester, his office has been working with the advisement office to “coach them up in how to help students navigate on the career side.”


Furthermore, he says that Hunter College has recently unveiled a new program called HunterWorks to further address these specific issues and help students launch their careers. 


According to the college’s official website, the program’s mission is to build a network of employer-partners, and “through strategic planning, we aim to position all Hunter students for career success by connecting them to full-time jobs aligned with their interests, fostering a diverse and flourishing workforce.”


Domanski explains that the program is also going to provide 20 internship coordinators and 20 faculty career specialists to support students. Internship coordinators will help students find internships they qualify for and help during the application process. The faculty specialists are essentially existing faculty members from each department who will act as “an expert in how students in that department can get a job,” Domanski says.


He also notes that the school is working on a program called Practitioners and Residents which is “directly a social mobility play,” Domanski says. Through this, the school will be hiring practitioners in specific fields to teach elective courses at Hunter. 


“We're hoping, through that program, [we can] give more direct exposure to students, especially first-generation students who don't have the social capital and professional networks already set up,” Domanski says. 


Alexandra​​ Feldhausen’s director-level role at the mayor’s office is centered on creating partnerships to encourage job and volunteer opportunities. Specifically, as director of insights and engagement of the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline, she is focused primarily on CUNY students pursuing the tech realm. 


Feldhausen’s role involves data analysis of the programs the mayor’s office rolls out. More specifically, she is involved in analyzing data collected from programs and “making sure that anything that we're doing is really reflective of the types of work that we want to be doing,” said Feldhausen. This is done with the goal of finding ways to better existing or future programs as well as determining if there were any notable benefits to ones already in place. 


Similar to Domanski, Feldhausen acknowledges that CUNY in general has not collected substantial data regarding students’ internships, jobs, and other roles during their time at college or upon graduation. Currently, her team is working to collect such data to better measure the success of CUNY students. The methods to collect such data parallel those being employed on Hunter’s campus as they are largely centered around voluntary student surveys. Statistically, there are reliability issues with such surveys given that people may not accurately self-report information. However, this can be addressed by increasing the sample size of students who submit the surveys.


The Tech Talent Pipeline team also has the goal of determining if their programs are beneficial in terms of benefiting students’ learning. To determine that, they conduct technical interviews before administering voluntary surveys. 


Feldhausen says that one of her main goals with the programs she oversees is to facilitate the growth of CUNY students’ networks. She acknowledged that it can be difficult for students of lower socioeconomic statuses to have built-in connections in competitive sectors thus making it more difficult to enter an industry. So while CUNY may have talented students, when applying for a job or internship, they may be overlooked for another applicant who had better connections.  


Of all the difficulties that she has come across in her role, Feldhausen cites capacity to be one of the most difficult hurdles to tackle. Particularly when it comes to partnering with various schools in the CUNY system, “​​thinking through how can you amass a team of folks that are interested in doing that same, the same work with you,” can become very complex especially when certain things are not in people’s job descriptions said Feldhausen. She ssays that one way they have attempted to get around the issue is by finding employees in the CUNY system who have overlapping priorities with those of the program, both personally and professionally. 


That is not the only issue when it comes to creating partnerships for CUNY campuses. Feldhausen says that often it takes a great deal of time and effort to connect with companies willing to collaborate with the mayor’s office on projects. 


“That is also a numbers game… sometimes it's like you have to reach out to 400 companies to get 10 emails to get two to sign on,” Feldhausen says.


She also said that while understaffing definitely plays a role in limiting the amount of help students receive on individual campuses, oftentimes having the right person in one role can accomplish much more work than a group of underqualified people. 


More specifically, she said that issues often stem from when people are initially hired on in the CUNY system and are not adequately trained during their onboarding processes. 


“They flounder for a while before they can get their footing,” Feldhausen says. “If anything, if we'd had better onboarding processes for the folks that are hired, that would also be really helpful.”


Feldhausen says that the mayor’s office is currently focusing on expanding existing programs to find more CUNY students opportunities in the tech sector. They are expanding the CUNY 2x Tech Initiative by increasing investment into the program with an additional $1.4 million grant to support approximately 2,000 CUNY students with majors from computer science departments. 


While Hunter College may still be known as CUNY’s crown jewel, the anecdotes of current students and alumni suggest that the institution still has many issues that need attention. And until more data is collected, it is difficult to say whether the moniker is deserved.

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