Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out about fund-raising for the City University of New York.
And, something new: the Monday quiz. On Mondays, we’ll ask a question about a story that we featured in New York Today the previous week. We’ll give you four possible answers. You can click on one of them and find out whether you’re right.
This week Félix Matos Rodríguez, the chancellor of the City University of New York, will use part of his annual state-of-the-university address to talk about big-money fund-raising — specifically, that CUNY took in $312 million in donations during the 2026 fiscal year, 26 percent more than in fiscal year 2025.
It was the first time that CUNY had collected more than $300 million in donations in a single year, and the money lifted the university’s total over the last four years to just under $1.1 billion.
Matos Rodríguez told me that CUNY cannot live by tax dollars alone, arguing that the university could not keep up if it did not augment the government money it receives. Of CUNY’s $4.9 billion budget, roughly $2.8 billion comes directly from the state and $833 million from the city. The rest — about $1.3 billion — comes from tuition, including students’ financial aid.
Matos Rodríguez told me that state and city funding for education in New York continued to rank among the highest in the nation, but that “the reality is our costs have increased” at the same time that “what the university does is becoming increasingly complex.”
In seeking donations, CUNY is following the pack. Colleges and universities raised $78 billion during the 2025 fiscal year, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Like CUNY, nearly two-thirds of the public institutions surveyed received more in donations in 2025 than in fiscal year 2024. In fact, the public colleges and universities had a very good year last year: In percentage terms, they led their private counterparts in donor pledges and promises to give.
That’s at least partly because they are paying more attention to fund-raising than they once did. Like many public universities, CUNY has expanded its development staff and its fund-raising infrastructure. “We got to that race later, so we have catch-up work to do,” Matos Rodríguez said.
CUNY has scored with nonprofits that see its mission as essential to the city’s future. “If you care about economic mobility for kids who grow in New York City, you have to care about CUNY,” said Cass Conrad, the executive director of the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, which contributed $5.7 million in funding for CUNY in the last year. “We recognize that CUNY lifts more people into the middle class than any other institution in the city.”
Matos Rodríguez said he has been working to reach potential donors. He spent much of one day last week at the annual conference of Grantmakers for Education, a network for educational philanthropy that brings together foundation officials and donors.
He says that federal and state tuition programs cover the basics for roughly three in four CUNY students, but that money doesn’t pay for initiatives that would make CUNY students “more competitive in a job interview.” Neither does it help with emergencies for students struggling with high housing costs or food insecurity. And the equipment in classrooms and laboratories needs to be kept up-to-date, too.
It’s a story CUNY has attempted to present before, but one it is now advancing with new urgency. Twenty-five years ago, the 23 colleges and professional schools in the CUNY system together raised just over $56 million. In 2011, that figure was $201 million — and, by then, fund-raising proficiency had become a part of the 23 presidents’ annual performance reviews.
But fund-raising slipped, even as CUNY grew, adding two new schools. In 2019, when Matos Rodríguez was named chancellor, CUNY collected $161.8 million. (CUNY now counts 26 campuses; its medical school, which had been a part of City College, became its own graduate-level institution in 2024.)
Matos Rodríguez said the payoff for what he called “the storytelling” was — no surprise — a bigger bottom line, with money from donors “you cannot lobby directly to,” like the billionaire MacKenzie Scott. Last year, she gave $50 million to Lehman College in the Bronx. She had given Lehman $30 million in 2020 and has given $50 million to five other CUNY campuses in that time.
“You hope you get on her radar,” Matos Rodríguez said.
The Monday quiz
This question comes from a recent edition of New York Today. Click on the answer you think is correct. You’ll go to the full article we published. The link is free.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the leader of the City Council agreed on legislation that would ban horse-drawn carriages from Central Park. What did the mayor say in a social media post?
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“This is one of those issues that should have been dealt with before I got here.”
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“Our administration will make sure workers and owners are protected and the horses are safe.”
Weather
Expect a sunny day with a high near 65. It will be cloudy in the evening, and the temperature will dip near 51.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Nov. 1 (All Saints’ Day).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Republicans are talking about issues like crime, which concerned us, like, two or three years ago. Everyone knows it’s their party and Trump who are responsible for the economic crisis. It’s their responsibility.” — Assemblyman Charles Lavine, a Democrat on Long Island who is backing Gov. Kathy Hochul over her Republican challenger, Bruce Blakeman.
The latest New York news
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An ICE target: Oscar Belgal’s attempts to fly under the radar quickly spiraled after he arrived in the city from the Dominican Republic in 2022. On Oct. 8, while Belgal was in a parked car with his 5-year-old son, a team of ICE officers in plain clothes surprised them, bringing a sudden hail of gunfire to the Marble Hill neighborhood.
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The first weekend of Cornell’s fraternity party ban: “Collegetown was a ghost town compared to previous years,” a junior at Cornell said. The school imposed the moratorium on parties at fraternity houses during the academic year as a safety measure amid the uproar over a sexual assault lawsuit filed last month by a former student known as Jane Doe.
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The O.J. Simpson case: More than 30 years after his double-murder trial in Los Angeles, new information has surfaced from interviews and recently unsealed New York court records that described an informant who had talked about the supposed location of the missing murder weapon.
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Inside Mira Nair’s Diwali dinner: Authors, artists, filmmakers and writers gathered at an Indian bistro near Gramercy Park to celebrate the Hindu festival of Diwali last week. One of the co-hosts was the Oscar-nominated filmmaker who is Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mother and has become one of most recognizable matriarchs in the South Asian diaspora. (The mayor did not attend.)
METROPOLITAN diary
A Brooklyn ocean
Dear Diary:
I was forced out of my Carroll Gardens home so a developer could tear it down. As a divorced mother, where would I find a three-bedroom for my two teens and me at an affordable rent?
I searched high and low and ended up moving south to Sunset Park. I found a raw loft space, which I fixed up. (Yes, I invested my own money in a rental.)
The apartment was directly above a 24-hour sex shop and it had a view of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I refused to open the windows and bought air purifiers.
Our first night there, I cried. What have I done? The noise from the B.Q.E., the constant shaking of the apartment — it all felt unbearable.
I was so depressed I wanted to leave the city altogether, but my kids were still in high school. I had no choice. I was trapped.
The next morning, I went for a long, anxious walk. I bumped into a barber who had been born and raised in the neighborhood, on Third Avenue.
I asked how he dealt with the noise and traffic.
He laughed.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “It’s my ocean.”
The big trucks, he explained, were crashing waves; small cars, ripples; and the whirring engines, the steady flow of water. He told me he missed these sounds whenever he went to the country.
His perspective changed everything. The second night, I slept like a baby, with a sound machine accompanying the “waves” of nighttime traffic.
Two years later, my home is a haven for my kids and me, and I fall asleep each night to the soothing rhythm of a Brooklyn “ocean.”
— Mara Stephens
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post CUNY Has Raised $312 Million. The Chancellor Explains Why. appeared first on New York Times.
