Higher ed investment benefits all

by Frank Wu

As president of Queens College, I tell our students my family is just like their family. In my dream job, I have come full circle: My parents came to the United States in the early 1960s, as students. I was born on these shores, and I know I owe my position today to the power of our system of higher education. It has been and can continue to be the engine of the proverbial American Dream.

This is especially true in the World’s Borough, where so many journeyed from far and wide, sacrificing for their next generation, because they identify with the ideals which beckon around the globe. Some critics doubt the value proposition of higher education. In the City University of New York system, however, we have confidence we are doing what we were established to do. We enable not only individuals but also communities to become upwardly mobile.

Rankings and studies consistently prove with compelling data the story our own students share. Although rival institutions may be charging more than $80,000 per year for undergraduate education, our tuition remains less than $8,000 — an order of magnitude difference. Thanks to the generous support of the state and the city, more than 40 percent of our students do not have to pay any of that either. So, regardless of your financial circumstances, it is still possible to put yourself through college if you are a student in our programs.

Our institution is an investment in the common good. While a few have lost confidence in the very concept, offering a self-fulfilling prophecy that our world consists only of persons pursuing their own self-interest without regard for others, we continue to put our idealism into practice.

Before the pandemic, we commissioned expert economists to consider the evidence. They documented that for every public dollar that is put into Queens College, the institution returns just shy of five to the

New York City economy through the efforts of its graduates. This alumni impact amounts to $1.5 billion. It represents collective earnings, taxes paid on those earnings, jobs created by alumni, taxes paid by their businesses, and spending by alumni. The study also revealed that nearly 85 percent of QC students stay in the metropolitan area after graduating. They earn an average of $34,500 more annually and $1.5 million over their working lifetime than a person with only a high school diploma.

More than a thousand people, including faculty and staff, alumni and students, developed our strategic plan. Even when it was impossible to hold town halls in person, they assembled on virtual platforms to envision our future. We agree that we want to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion. These have been core values well before any controversy over the basic concepts of fighting discrimination in all its forms and promoting respect for everyone who would extend it in turn.

So many of our students are double majors. They know change has become the only constant. Their careers, plural rather than singular, will demand adaptation. That is why we opened a new arts school and a new business school simultaneously. The savvy art student will take a business course, and vice versa. The renowned school of education is exemplary. All of those being trained to teach an even younger generation are essentially double majors: They learn a subject such as history or physics, and then they learn how to pass on their knowledge and skills.

Future Education

To prepare our students to work and to help them secure jobs with decent wages in their field of study is the minimum. We must do more than that. Our responsibility is to make ready engaged citizens. Democracy is sustained by participation. Since 1937, our motto has been, “We learn that we may serve.” Now, we recognize that the best leaders are those who serve. Yet all the good we can do is possible only with mutual commitment to the social contract. The pandemic tested our resolve to come together. We pledged, with the hope which was needed to make it through such an extended crisis, that afterward we would try to do better than we had before. Higher education makes that possible, and our campus is one of those few places where people of all ethnicities and all faiths are bound together in aspirations to improve their lot in life and the world around them.

Queens College tuition is still below $8,000 a year, a tenth of what many rivals charge.

I am humbled to hold the role that I have, because I am inspired by our students. We have a duty to empower them. Q

Frank Wu is President of Queens College.

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