Committee on Workforce Development meeting
February 27, 2026, 11:00 AM
Jointly with the Committee on Higher Education
The committee, meeting jointly with the Committee on Higher Education, held an oversight hearing on aligning higher education programs with workforce demand in New York City.
What was discussed
- Co-Chairs Joseph and Won open the joint hearing on aligning higher education with workforce demand Council Member Rita Joseph, Chair of Higher Education, and Council Member Julie Won, Chair of the newly established Committee on Workforce Development, opened the joint oversight hearing on aligning CUNY's offerings with the labor market. They framed the discussion around CUNY and NYC Talent's joint
- CUNY on scaling career success through CUNY Beyond Vice Chancellor Lauren Anderson testified that CUNY's 2023 strategic plan set goals of a job offer at graduation for 75 percent of graduates by 2030 and tripling paid internships to 30 percent, and that evidence-based interventions—paid internships, integrated advisors, industry specialists, and
- CUNY on its K-16 pipelines from high school to adult learners Senior University Dean Andrea Soonachan testified about CUNY's early-credit and adult pathways: College Now, through which 31,000 public school students completed over 44,000 credit courses last year; Future Ready NYC, offering 197 career pathways at 157 high schools; Work, Learn, Grow; and CUNY
- NYC Talent on coordinating a sprawling workforce system Doug Lipari, Executive Director of the NYC Office of Talent and Workforce Development, testified that the city's workforce ecosystem spans more than 150 programs across over 30 agencies, and that NYC Talent's role is to align that system with job-seeker needs and employer demand. He highlighted the
- How do CUNY and NYC Talent keep curriculum aligned with the labor market, especially around AI? Vice Chancellor Anderson told Chair Joseph that alignment happens continuously through industry specialists embedded in departments rather than on a fixed meeting cadence, because AI is reshaping every sector so quickly. She said CUNY runs industry-taught AI workshops (with partners like EY
- How is Future Ready NYC funded and scaled, and what career pathways does it cover? Dean Soonachan told Chair Won that Future Ready spans 11 industry fields—including pre-nursing, EMT, cybersecurity, data science, HVAC/decarbonization, and business pathways—with each high school offering multi-course sequences, and that CUNY-side enrollment is projected to grow from about 7,500 to
- What is CUNY doing to improve career-outcomes data collection? Vice Chancellor Anderson told Chair Joseph that career-success efforts have historically been tracked in disconnected pockets, and that CUNY Beyond is defining common metrics and leading indicators and building a dashboard that links program participation to employment outcomes drawn from the State
- How does NYC Talent use labor-market data, and what is its budget and staffing? Doug Lipari told Council Member Cabán that NYC Talent's Data and Impact Team monitors labor-market data and employer roundtables to inform how agencies deliver programming, and that the office has 37 staff plus three apprentices, one dedicated to the Center for Youth Employment, with an FY27 program
- What happened to the Green Economy Action Plan investment, and what of CUF's big-funding and workforce-czar ideas? Vice Chancellor Anderson told Chair Won that the Green Economy Action Plan provided over $10 million in capital for eight green-workforce projects—including a net-zero house and a decarbonization lab—across six CUNY campuses. Doug Lipari said the roughly $800 million already invested in city
- What is CUNY doing about its reliance on underpaid adjunct faculty? Pressed by Chair Won on why so many CUNY professors are part-time adjuncts without full benefits, Vice Chancellor Anderson said CUNY's contract with the Professional Staff Congress last year included raises for adjuncts and that workforce investments like CUNY 2X Tech fund some full-time faculty
- What pathways exist for immigrant adult learners with foreign credentials? Council Member Hanif pressed CUNY and NYC Talent on helping immigrant New Yorkers with credentials or professional experience from their home countries move out of survival jobs. Doug Lipari cited an SBS program for foreign nurses and a licensed-practical-nurse apprenticeship pilot with 1199 and
- What is CUNY's advisor-to-student ratio, and how can career advising scale? Vice Chancellor Anderson told Council Member Epstein that CUNY's integrated advising model runs at a 200-to-1 student-to-advisor ratio and exists in only 22 departments, while general career-services ratios run far higher. She said scaling integrated advisors individually would cost over $300
- Center for an Urban Future urges the city to scale what works at CUNY Eli Dvorkin, Editorial and Policy Director of the Center for an Urban Future and co-author of its five-ideas report, testified that CUNY remains the city's most effective engine of economic mobility but that only two-thirds of graduates are employed within a year and just 12 percent complete a paid
- CUNY student leaders call for free OMNY cards and scaled career programs University Student Senate leaders Akkeem Polack (Chairperson and CUNY trustee), Rhoda Wilson, Damir Shavkatov, and Benjamin Wade testified that career and internship access at CUNY functions like a lottery tied to campus and major, and that transportation cost is a foundational barrier. They urged
- St. Francis College president on aligning a liberal-arts education with careers Timothy Cecere, President of St. Francis College, testified as a private-college voice sharing the same communities and employers as CUNY, describing how the college merged its academic advising and career development departments and reoriented its liberal-arts core toward workforce readiness in
- NYC Employment and Training Coalition on reframing workforce as an employer solution Greg Morris, CEO of the NYC Employment and Training Coalition, testified that workforce development should be reframed as an employer solution that drives economic mobility and growth, and flagged populations the hearing had not reached—out-of-school out-of-work young adults, workers needing to
- COOP Careers on the underemployment trap facing first-generation graduates Kalani Leifer, CEO of COOP Careers and a CUNY alum, testified that no institution currently owns the transition from college to career, leaving first-generation and Pell-eligible graduates disproportionately stuck in underemployment—more than half of Pell graduates are underemployed a year after
Agenda
1 item
- T2026-1017 Oversight - Aligning Higher Education with Workforce Demand. Hearing Held by Committee