First-of-its-kind report card grades SUNY

This spring SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher launched the SUNY Report Card, an exclusive evaluation tool that will publicly track the university’s system-wide work as an educator, job creator, community partner and generator of boundary-breaking research.

With the release of its report card May 17 moderated by Benita Zahn ’76, SUNY took the unprecedented step of measuring the university system’s performance against New York’s greatest social and economic needs, including the alignment of SUNY’s research capacity to statewide job growth and the state’s ability to capture a greater share of the global green energy market, among other measures.

Benita Zahn ’76, left, moderated the May 17 presentation of the SUNY Report Card by Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher, right.

“Part of what makes the Report Card unique is that it doesn’t merely measure SUNY’s value in terms of the number of degrees it bestows or the breadth of its curricula, but by the tangible, long-term impact SUNY will have on the economy and quality of life in New York State,” said Zimpher. “No other university system in the country is doing this. We are thinking outside of the SUNY box — inviting the public to measure the system’s actions against its ability to address our state’s greatest needs.

The inaugural SUNY Report Card establishes a baseline for
providing the public with a comprehensive look at the status of SUNY’s goals and initiatives across a broad spectrum of critical areas, including: student diversity and creating greater access to higher education, SUNY’s impact on the state economy and reducing energy consumption.

SUNY Oswego President Deborah F. Stanley said, “The SUNY Report Card is a great start at using metrics to help provide focus and direction as we work to bring excellence and accountability to every aspect of our entire State University system, and it will only improve as we further refine the metrics to give us the best and most helpful information. The SUNY Report Card will also help citizens understand what a great resource we have now in our state’s higher education system and ways we can make it even better and harness its full power for the greater good of New York.”

See the Report Card online at suny.edu/powerofsuny/reportcard

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