A common story about higher education in New York is the one about Columbia, NYU, Cornell, the prestige, and the desire to live in Manhattan. On the other hand, there is a story that affects more lives. It takes place on 64 campuses from Long Island to the North Country and graduates more than 96,000 students every year. The State University of New York is that, and most people outside of New York may not have giving it much thought.
SUNY, as everyone knows it, wasn’t really started out of ambition. A bit of an embarrassment, New York was one of the last states in the country to set up a real public university system. When Governor Thomas E. Dewey signed it into law in 1948, the foundation was made up of different teacher training schools from the 1800s. They were functional, but not exactly world-class.
The rest of the story is about what happened after that. Governor Nelson Rockefeller cared about the system personally and pushed for its construction, growth, and acquisition. He also brought the private University of Buffalo into the public system. That move alone made a big difference in how the system worked.
Today, SUNY has an annual budget of $13.37 billion and employs almost 88,000 people. About $26.8 billion is lost every year in New York State’s economy because of it. You wouldn’t expect these numbers from a school that isn’t talked about much when people talk about higher education in the U.S. The two main campuses, Stony Brook University on Long Island and the University at Buffalo, are real research powerhouses. Together, they spend more than $1.5 billion a year on research across the whole system. Not much was said about the University at Albany until Omar M. Yaghi shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. That’s not a small note.
The fact that SUNY tries to serve so many people at once is what makes its structure interesting and truly unique. Some research universities are very busy with federal grants and doctoral programs. In the same building, there are community colleges that offer GED prep and training for the job market. One law school, two medical schools, one technology school, and one maritime school are all in the city. The college of optometry at SUNY appears to be the only one of its kind in the whole state. A lot of different things need to be managed under one roof, and it’s possible that the sheer number of them makes the system harder to understand than it should be.
On a Tuesday morning, walking through Albany’s campus makes you think of what it is: a big public research university. Students are moving from building to building, faculty offices are lit up, and there is construction going on somewhere in the background. It doesn’t look like an underdog at all. A school’s history, on the other hand, has a weight that the buildings themselves don’t quite convey. The system was created in part because of how openly racist New York’s private schools were. In the middle of the 20th century, these schools often turned away students based on their race or religion. It wasn’t just a policy choice to make a public alternative. There was a mistake.
In ways that don’t make sense for a state system, SUNY has grown far beyond the state of New York. The SUNY Korea campus opened in 2012 in Incheon, South Korea. It has programs run by teachers from Stony Brook and the Fashion Institute of Technology. In Pennsylvania, Jamestown Community College is hired to run a center. There are students in the system from 171 different countries. There’s been a long way to go for something that began as a group of regional teacher colleges.
At the moment, the focus seems to be on aligning the workforce. For example, there are training programs for semiconductors in New York’s growing chip industry, as well as AI research projects and the Empire State Service Corps, which encourages students to get involved in their communities. A tour called the SUNY Reconnect Tour has taken Chancellor John B. King to community colleges across the state. This shows that there is still a lot of work to be done on retention and access. At least being honest seems like a good sign.
It’s not clear if SUNY will ever get the national attention that a school of its size probably deserves. It might be too big and varied to fit neatly into the way most people think about universities, which is based on rankings. But right now, almost 1.8 million SUNY graduates are working in New York. That’s not a system that’s trying to stay relevant. One is doing the work in silence.
