The ten years since New York City College of Technology prepared for the last re-accreditation review by the Middle States Commission have seen transformative change for the college—in size, strength of the faculty, scope of the programs, facilities, external relations, and opportunities for faculty and students. The college has adopted an outcomes-oriented general education program that adds dimension and richness to its career-focused degree programs, and it has integrated systematic assessment meaningfully into our work. City Tech’s agenda for continued improvement is still urgent and full, but with the ribbon cutting for the college’s new academic building in Fall 2017, the college will attain a significant and highly visible milestone. A tremendous asset in itself, the new building will also free up spaces that can be used to leverage the next stage of City Tech’s growth and development.

Early in the self-study process, as directed by Middle States, we developed goals for the process. Each of our five goals speaks not only to City Tech’s current status but also to challenges and opportunities in the short and long terms:

1. Engage college constituencies in an inclusive and transparent self-study process that will expand their understanding of the broader context for the institution in which they study or work and thus enable fully informed participation in planning and decision-making.
2. Demonstrate conclusively that the institution meets all the standards and merits reaffirmation of accreditation.
3. Affirm for both external and internal constituencies the transformative process that has taken place at City Tech and will continue from a narrowly focused, largely associate degree institution to an innovative baccalaureate college of technology, well connected to the disciplines, industries, and professions it represents and playing a unique role within CUNY.
4. Ensure that assessment of each area identified in the standards is employed in an integrated process to move the institution forward.
5. Use the results of the self-analysis to generate wise and useful recommendations to inform the next iterative step in strategic planning.

The process has surely been both inclusive and transparent, involving virtually every academic and administrative department, as well as students. Committee members have expressed appreciation for the opportunity to learn more about how the college functions, the factors our students must contend with, and the larger issues that affect higher education. We have found, however, that our colleagues who are not directly involved, while interested in the recommendations and often invested in having a role in planning and decision-making, may be more focused on the impact to their own departments or disciplines than in higher education writ large. We now understand that engagement is a longer-term task, and that addressing some of the working groups’ findings related to sharing of information, supporting collaborative work, and facilitating communication and participation is essential to achieving an increased level of engagement. We recognize the role that sharing our self-study findings with the college community and considering their responses can play in strengthening that community and we look forward to continuing the process through the team visit and beyond.

The working groups reported that across the board and to a very high degree their analysis confirms that the college meets the Standards. As a constituent unit of the City University of New York, City Tech is located in a complex context, with many layers of oversight for virtually all aspects of our work. CUNY requires an annual review of the college’s progress toward meeting a structured and systematic set of goals with measurable targets. CUNY’s colleges gain numerous advantages from being part of this vast system, all within a single city. At the same time, under the president’s leadership, each college sets its own course and articulates its own mission. City Tech, with nearly 8,000 students enrolled in STEM programs—by far the largest number of any CUNY college—has a unique mission in CUNY, as the only college of technology. It is a mission that is only now being understood and acknowledged by our CUNY colleagues.

City Tech’s mission embodies an inherent challenge, charging us to create instructional designs and student experiences and supports that will enable a student population that is enormously diverse in the degree of college readiness to succeed in academically rigorous programs leading to rewarding careers. Like other open admission institutions, City Tech has not been as successful as we would wish in this regard; however, our commitment is unwavering, and with new resources and opportunities from CUNY and from grants, we are giving top priority to a retention and completion agenda for our students. Every constituency with whom the committee has shared the results of this self-study has affirmed the pre-eminence of this goal for the college.

The college observes ethical standards and maintains integrity in its delivery of services and business practices. It offers programs of high quality, many holding separate accreditations, taught by a highly qualified and dedicated faculty. In keeping with our hands-on, career oriented focus, students have many opportunities for experiential learning. This serves them well, and the college scores high in the movement of alumni up the economic ladder. As the college has become more baccalaureate-focused, an increasing number of graduates continue in professional and graduate programs. The rapid pace of change in STEM disciplines, and especially in technology, has seen fields of study become increasingly interdisciplinary. Correspondingly, City Tech’s faculty has eagerly explored potential interdisciplinary collaborations in teaching and in research. Services are in place to support the student learning experience, and a number of special programs offer additional benefits and have been shown to increase student success. Since the last self-study the faculty has engaged in comprehensive, ongoing assessment of student learning, and departments routinely incorporate their findings into curricular change, improved pedagogy, and program revisions. The physical resources, severely deteriorated in the early 2000’s, have seen sweeping improvements, largely informed by the academic needs of the programs. To come, there will be spaces for students, faculty research and collaboration, Continuing Education’s pre-college and workforce programs serving the community, and additional classrooms. Finally, a well-qualified president and administrative staff lead the college, and it enjoys an effective local governance body.

At the same time, the reports identified critical areas where the college is acting forcefully to address needed improvements. They also offered recommendations that will further the goals of the 2014-2019 Strategic Plan and begin to inform the next strategic planning process:

Recommendation 1:

Implement a comprehensive, cross-institutional plan for student retention and success.
(Standard IV)

City Tech’s goals are at least to double the rate at which associate degree students either complete their degrees in three years or transfer to baccalaureate programs, and to achieve a six-year graduation rate of 50 % for bachelor’s students. Over the next eight years, City Tech will make measurable progress towards this goal by:

• Coordinating extant retention and completion programs under a single cross-institutional student success effort;
• Identifying and implementing financially viable means of scaling particularly successful programs, like CUNY ASAP and orientation that focus on retention of first year and associate degree students;
• Implementing CUNY’s recent policy on developmental math and streamlining the math sequences to remove a major obstacle to student progress and instead make learning math a path to success;
• Securing resources through grants and other means to acquire digital analytical and communication tools and further support student success programs.
• Effectively communicating to all students, faculty, and staff a broad understanding of student support resources and a shared vision of the student success agenda.

Recommendation 2:

Build on the academic continuous improvement model to strengthen overall institutional assessment and effectiveness
(Standard V)

Expand practices instituted to assess student learning outcomes to engage all units across the college in a continuous assessment process in which data are gathered and analyzed to guide institutional directions and improvement:

• Expand the City Tech Assessment Committee membership to include representation from student support units, business services, and administration;
• Expand assessment of learning outcomes to include student learning beyond the classroom.
• Undertake targeted assessment of the effectiveness of intra-institutional and external communications in support of the communication-related goals defined in Recommendations 1, 3, 4 and 5.

Recommendation 3:

Improve scope, documentation, and transparency in the complaint resolution process
(Standard II)

Ensure clarity for all constituents regarding the processes for addressing stakeholder concerns:

• Enhance efforts to publicize complaint policies and procedures consistently online, and in all academic, student affairs, and business services offices, including those policies that are based on law, statute or regulations, i.e., Title IX, Sexual Harassment, Health and Safety;
• Make clear that CUNY and the College have established policies and procedures that address rights of the members of the community to communicate complaints;
• Capture and utilize these data effectively for institutional improvement

Recommendation 4:

Refine our facilities and technology master plans to take advantage of new opportunities.
(Standard VI and III)

Optimize opportunities created by the new academic building, including space made available by the relocation of programs from the Pearl Building.

• Engage stakeholders in a cross-institutional review of facilities and technology plans in order to empower the college to fulfill its mission into the future: to attract external partners; to remain nimble and responsive to workforce needs; to support course availability and new modalities of instruction; to leverage technology for intellectual exchange and collaboration in an increasingly commuter context; and to cultivate a positive and cohesive institutional identity.
• To respond to the increasingly interdisciplinary context for our programs, make shared resources and collaboration a primary consideration.

Recommendation 5:

Nurture a shared sense of mission and identity that fosters pride in City Tech’s unique program offerings and that emphasizes ambition for excellence
(Standards I and VII)

Excelling as a baccalaureate-level college of technology requires that the entire institution—administration, faculty, staff, students—share an understanding of the potential for growth enabled by our revitalized program offerings. Over the next eight years, we will make progress towards this ideal by:

• Leveraging best practices to communicate to the college community and to external stakeholders about new program offerings, and about the scholarly and professional achievements of City Tech’s students, faculty, staff, and alumni;
• Engaging collaboration across college units to ensure that the mission and goals of all departments and offices explicitly link to the overall mission of the college and include goals for supporting student success, post-graduation placement, and support for faculty and student scholarship;
• Promoting deeper student involvement in the realization and communication of the college mission by increasing student participation in college governance, and in institutional planning.

Perhaps the most consistent thread, observed across the self-study, is the powerful conviction that the college is at an exciting point, with strong enrollment, new programs, an excellent faculty, greatly improved facilities, and exceptional opportunities. To move forward, City Tech as a community needs to address several challenges that are in part specific to this institution but that in large measure are typical of commuter institutions and those experiencing transition and significant growth: engagement, collaboration, integration of processes, and communication. In each of these areas, an effective, integrated assessment strategy built on the work done in the academic domain and increasingly in the student and non-academic domains will be an essential asset.