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Albany, NY – The State University of New York, with more than 400,000 students and a budget of $11 billion, is releasing what it considers an unprecedented report card detailing how the
nation's biggest public system of higher education is performing. WAMC's Ian Pickus reports...
SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, who took over in 2009, said the system is asking New Yorkers to hold it accountable. She says the annual report card, the first of which is to be released tomorrow, is unique in higher education.
The move comes after SUNY lost nearly 30 percent of its state funding over three years through Albany's more common fiscal practice of political deals cut in back rooms. Technically a state agency under a governor's fiscal control, SUNY has absorbed the same repeated 10-percent cuts that former Governor David Paterson and now Governor Andrew Cuomo have assessed against agencies to address massive deficits.
But polls have shown strong support for education funding, even in the fiscal crisis, and Zimpher has been crossing the state since she arrived pitching a plan to put SUNY at the top academic rungs in the country while being an economic engine for the state.
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