The City University of New York—the nation’s largest urban public university system—has made steady progress toward boosting completion rates and propelling its predominantly low-income students toward the middle class. However, a new report from the Center for an Urban Future finds that, despite those gains, many graduates are struggling to access well-paying local jobs.
The report finds that entry-level job postings in New York City have plunged 37.4 percent since 2022, while paid internship postings are down 37.1 percent from pre-pandemic levels.
CUNY, which spans 25 two- and four-year campuses and serves more than 200,000 students, is feeling the impact. Just 12 percent of undergraduates complete a paid internship—far below the national average of 57 percent, the report found.
In an increasingly difficult hiring environment, city and state leaders should prioritize expanding employer partnerships—particularly with the private sector, said Eli Dvorkin, editorial and policy director at the Center for an Urban Future.
“It’s not the quality of the academics—it’s the accessibility of work experience and professional networks, and being able to access them early and often,” Dvorkin said.
“CUNY is a really complex organization, and that ecosystem can be challenging for employers,” he added. “Instead of having no wrong door, it often feels like there’s no door at all, and many employers still don’t understand how to tap into the system.”
He added that the university has made remarkable progress in helping students earn degrees; the three-year graduation rate at CUNY’s community colleges has doubled over the past decade. However, the report found that many graduates still struggle to find careers aligned with their degrees. Roughly one in 10 alumni ends up working in retail or food service five years after graduation—a figure that rises to 13 percent for community college graduates.
Dvorkin said the decline in entry-level opportunities is especially daunting for CUNY students, given competition from the roughly 100,000 other college graduates in New York City each year, the report found.
“CUNY students are in this flooded labor market trying to differentiate themselves and stand out,” Dvorkin said. “They’re competing with graduates from other universities—from NYU and Columbia—and from folks that were recently laid off in the labor market and are now competing for similar jobs but have two to three years of experience.”
Dvorkin noted that CUNY is the city’s “single largest and most important engine of upward economic mobility,” with career success initiatives already showing promising results. Under Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez, the university has launched programs like CUNY Beyond, a systemwide effort to prioritize career exploration and outcomes.
But these efforts currently reach only a fraction of students, underscoring the need to expand them significantly, Dvorkin said.
“The job of city and state policymakers now isn’t to invent new methods of connecting CUNY students to careers, but to invest in scaling up what’s already working,” Dvorkin said.
The barriers: Drawing on more than 80 interviews with employers, faculty, administrators and nonprofit leaders, the report identifies seven barriers to deeper employer engagement:
Employers say navigating CUNY’s 25 campuses is “confusing and time-consuming.”Career services are siloed from academics, and staff are often overwhelmed, with some serving more than 1,100 students.Hybrid academic-career advisers and industry specialists embedded in academic departments are making a difference—but exist in only about 40 of CUNY’s 450 departments.Students have too few opportunities for early career exploration and to learn industry needs, in part because most opportunities are “extracurricular and not embedded in required courses.”Nonprofit and intermediary partners with strong industry ties remain underutilized.CUNY lacks a modern, systemwide customer relationship management platform to track, coordinate and share employer engagement across campuses.Many campuses don’t use modern employment platforms like Handshake, instead relying on separate job boards or third-party services—creating a fragmented experience.
Dvorkin said that because CUNY students have limited access to paid internships and work-based learning, far too many are missing out on early work experiences and networking opportunities that can make a crucial difference in landing a job after graduation.
“One of the best ways New York City employers can support our affordability agenda is by hiring New Yorkers and partnering with [CUNY] on structured pathways into the good jobs their companies are creating,” Dvorkin said. “The problem is that most large employers in New York City have never been approached this way.”
Looking ahead: Dvorkin suggested that Mayor Zohran Mamdani leverage his “political capital” to set the tone with private sector employers and emphasize partnerships with CUNY to create meaningful career pathways for students.
“If the mayor were to come out and say, ‘The city of New York is going to double down on its efforts to hire CUNY students and create work-based learning opportunities, and we want other major employers to join us,’ I think that would be a powerful message that would resonate,” Dvorkin said.
He said that given the historic growth in graduation rates, it’s time for city and state leaders to pivot from a “focus on college success to career success.”
“The mayor doesn’t need Albany or any other stakeholders to advance that part of the mission,” he said. “These are actions the mayor can take himself, and they would make a meaningful difference in expanding access to good jobs for New Yorkers from low-income backgrounds.”
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