“We salute ������Ƶ for its outstanding academics and we are truly pleased to recommend it to prospective applicants searching for their personal ‘best-fit’ college,” said Robert Franek, The Princeton Review’s editor-in-chief and lead author of The Best 386 Colleges. The education services company surveyed 143,000 students nationwide about their school’s academics, campus life, and student body.

In the profile, was praised for its rigorous academic standards. Students called the CUNY senior college “the perfect representative of Brooklyn as a borough and [of] success in the community,” and an institution that, like its home borough, “educates its students in an environment that reflects diversity, opportunity (study abroad, research, athletics, employment), and support.”

“This national ranking is the latest affirmation that ������Ƶ is committed to offering an excellent educational experience to its diverse student body,” ������Ƶ President Michelle J. Anderson said. “������Ƶ is an exceptional choice for any undergraduate or graduate student looking for a great academic challenge.”

The Princeton Review also cited the success of the college’s Magner Career Center, which provides students the knowledge, skills, values, and opportunities that are essential to fulfilling their career aspirations and succeeding in today’s competitive global economy.

The Princeton Review does not rank the colleges in the book from 1 to 386. Instead, it reports 62 ranking lists of top 20 schools in various categories important to prospective applicants and their parents. The guidebook profiles 14 percent of 2,800 four-year colleges in the United States. .

As the fall semester approached, ������Ƶ received more accolades when examined which 24 U.S. colleges provided the best return on students’ investment based on earnings and cost data, and ranked the college at number 11.

Business Insider used the most recent available data from the Department of Education’s Scorecard that includes such figures as cost of tuition, enrollment, and student debt, and created a ratio of median earnings from 10 years after first attending college to the average cost of attendance.

also highlighted schools that best combine quality and affordability in its “Best Colleges in America, Ranked by Value” list, and ������Ƶ made that list at number 164.

Some other recent recognitions ������Ƶ has earned include:

• Among 200 Best Value Colleges in the United States—Princeton Review, 2020
• Top 40 Best Colleges for Your Money in the United States—Money, 2019
• 100 Best Value Colleges in the United States—Forbes, 2019
• The #1 most ethnically diverse U.S. college in the north—U.S. News & World Report, 2019
• Best Value Colleges in the United States—Princeton Review, 2019
• Top 15 U.S. colleges in the north with the best undergraduate teaching program—U.S. News & World Report, 2019
• Top 20 U.S. public colleges in the north—U.S. News & World Report, 2019
• Top 10 Four-year Public Institutions for Student-mobility Rates—Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018
• Top Colleges in New York State—Princeton Review, 2018
• Best Value Colleges—Forbes, 2018

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“At ������Ƶ, we’re committed to the success of our transfer students,” says President Michelle J. Anderson. “This generous gift from the Petrie Foundation will help to ensure that our students have the support they need to complete their degrees.”

Transfer students typically make up more than 50 percent of the college’s student population, and the vast majority of those transfers come from Kingsborough and the Borough of Manhattan community colleges. But transfer students often face unique obstacles to graduation that require greater support and academic advisement.

“They encounter transfer shock,” says Tracy Newton, executive director of Academic Advising and Student Success. “They’re used to having multilayered support. They’re eager to study and want to maintain their momentum, but when they don’t have the support they need, their path to graduation can end up being a very winding one.”

The grant will help address the issue by providing funds to hire three transfer advisement coaches, three transfer completion coaches, and four peer transfer advisers. It will also support ������Ƶ in establishing a presence—which will be virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic—at the two-year schools to support pre-matriculation events, early advisement sessions, and other events for transfer students.

The additional staffing will be key in establishing what Newton calls a “collaborative care model” in which the transfer advisement coaches will facilitate workshops to orient students to the college’s academic life as well as connect them to the appropriate faculty and departmental advisers. The completion coaches will act as intermediaries, advocating for students and navigating them through obstacles that may increase their time to degree or their risk for fatigue. Completion coaches will have a particular focus on the final semester.

“One of the biggest takeaways we want transfer students to have is that there will always be someone here to help them,” says Newton.

Newton says that the biggest gains she hopes to see are better graduation and retention rates and less time and fewer excess credits needed to graduate.

“We will make sure that we offer students a consistent and reliable support system. We want them to know that we are here for them from commitment to completion. They have a partner in this journey and their success is important to us,” she says.

The Petrie Foundation has a long history of supporting students at CUNY. At ������Ƶ, the foundation supports the Food Pantry and emergency grants aimed at helping students complete their degree.

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With this kind of data in mind, ������Ƶ is pushing all students to complete 30 credits per year, and to specifically complete crucial English and math credits during their first year, as part of the Academic Momentum campaign, a CUNY-wide drive to help students earn their degrees in four years. To do so, the college has been beefing up student support and examining crucial questions about how to structure courses, majors, and financial aid.

“We’re trying to help students achieve their success by creating a holistic approach,” says Jesus Perez ‘95, director of the Center for Academic Advisement and Student Success or CAASS. “We know that in order to achieve that, all the pieces of the machine have to come together. From the academic departments to the administration, to the financial side of the house, everybody’s asking what are we doing right and what can we do better to help students move through the college faster.”

Completing a degree, or 120 credits, in four years is still not mandatory for ������Ƶ students. College officials recognize it won’t be possible for everyone to achieve this goal, but statistics show that students who complete required credits in English and math in their first year often stand a better chance of graduating in four years.

Advisers also stress that completing a degree in four years helps students stay in line with financial aid and scholarship requirements. New York State financial aid is limited to eight semesters and the state’s new Excelsior Scholarship requires students to take and earn 30 credits a year in order to qualify.

Perez says that one of the biggest tools his office is pushing in order to help students stay on track is degree mapping, where students get a map of suggested courses to follow each semester that makes it easier for them to understand how to graduate in four years in each major. The college is also looking to improve the DegreeWorks system, which provides students with details about the courses they have taken and those that are still required for graduation.

Additionally, the college is also looking into creating “meta majors,” where individual majors are grouped under one academic umbrella, an option for students who come into college unsure of which specific field they want to go into. They aren’t official majors but they allow students to take widely-applicable courses and not lose ground while they figure out which direction they want to go. Perez adds that his office will be working with faculty to identify students who may be falling behind in key courses in order to offer interventions to keep them on track.

The push isn’t simply about which courses to take. Tracy Newton, executive director of student success, says that advisers want to help students plan out “high impact” activities like internships and study abroad that enrich the academic journey.

“It isn’t just about finishing in four, it’s about finishing with a robust amount of knowledge and experience,” she says.

Both Perez and Newton stress that it is incumbent upon “student success partners” across campus to work together closely in order to achieve these goals

“This is not about forcing a student to complete a degree in four years, it’s about supporting them and giving them the opportunity to do that, taking into consideration all the variables in their lives,” says Newton. “They have very heavy lives and that does not come out of the equation for us. But we want to give them a clear path where requirements, course offerings, and student support services align with student needs. We’re really thinking through this campaign to make sure we do everything we can so that students can progress.”

For more information on the Academic Momentum campaign, contact the Center for Academic Advisement and Student Success at 3207 Boylan Hall, 718.951.5471, or at caass@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

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After reading the tome, named after the sobriquet Shteyngart’s own mother lovingly gave to him, the crowd was expecting this brand of humor. The freshmen gathered for the First College Year Common Reading event laughed heartily.

First semester students were required to read his memoir as part of the common reading program, in which students write their own memoirs or other critical responses to the work, participate in a panel discussion by faculty members, and take part in other shared intellectual experiences.

Shteyngart, sporting a five o-clock shadow, blue jeans, and a dark plaid shirt, kept the jokes coming, displaying the timing of a comedian with lines like: “I was sentenced to eight years of Hebrew School for a crime I didn’t commit.”

Beneath all of the humor was a probing discussion that delved into many issues the book addressed, and the students could clearly relate to, like coming of age as a first-generation immigrant in America and grappling with identity.

In the book, the Russian-born writer talks about attending Hebrew school in Queens in the 1980s and being mocked as a “Red Gerbil” because he came from the “evil empire,” something that prompted him to try to pass off his accent as German.

“You know things are bad when you have to convince Jewish kids you’re German,” he told the students, looking up from a rumpled collation of pages he was reading from.

Shteyngart is the author of three highly-praised novels, bursting on the writing scene more than a decade ago with his debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Riverhead 2002), which won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. He followed with Absurdistan (Random House 2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (Random House 2010), both also well-received novels that earned him book of the year nods from multiple prominent publications and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Esquire, and GQ. The Manhattanite currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

Shteyngart was asked if, considering all of his literary success, his parents still considered him a “little failure” for not going into law, medicine, “or that strange new category known only as computer,” as he writes in the book.

“Well they call me Big Failure now,” he told the students. “When the books came out and did fairly well, my mom said, ‘You have a best-selling book. Maybe now you can get into Harvard Law School.'”

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