for The New York Times: Baruch College, an Upward-Mobility Machine by José A. Alvarado Jr.

News

for The New York Times: Baruch College, an Upward-Mobility Machine

josé a. alvarado jr.

Apr 9, 2024

Location: New York, New York

Summary

The New York school is praised as a model college in a new report on diversity in higher education.

City College of New York often serves as a nostalgic symbol of American higher education’s past. The college did not charge tuition for decades, and its students, many of them poor, went on to become Nobel laureates, chief executives, civil rights leaders and more. By contrast, higher education today can seem both less accessible and less rigorous.

But it turns out that the school that occupies City College’s original 19th-century campus, on the East Side of Manhattan, has done a fine job of living up to its predecessor’s legacy.

That school is Baruch College, and it is an upward-mobility machine.

More than 60 percent of Baruch students receive Pell grants, which means they typically come from the bottom half of the income distribution. About 75 percent of undergraduates are people of color. The average annual cost of attending Baruch for low-income students is less than $2,000. And Baruch’s six-year graduation rate is 74 percent, well above the national average.

When I asked S. David Wu, an engineering scholar who is Baruch’s president, about City College’s original vision of educating the masses, he told me, “In many ways, Baruch is realizing that vision, but in a 21st-century way.”

Photographed for The New York Times, with words by David Leonhardt

Baruch College, an Upward-Mobility Machine
The New York school is praised as a model college in a new report on diversity in higher education.
Nytimes.com

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José A. Alvarado Jr.

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