Our Vision, Our Mission, and Our Guiding Concepts

Our Vision

The CUNY School of Professional Studies (CUNY SPS), grounded in CUNY’s tradition of access and academic excellence, is dedicated to being the University’s premier school for adult learners. Adapting to the needs of our students across a growing range of fields and sectors, we expand CUNY’s ability to address the demands of evolving workplaces and disciplines. With core values of responsiveness and quality, and as the University’s leader in online learning, we will continue to introduce new opportunities that expand the possibility and promise of public education, and position our students to grow personally, excel in the workplace, and enrich their communities.

Our Mission

The CUNY School of Professional Studies (CUNY SPS) provides online, classroom-based, and customized programs of study that are responsive to the needs of our students and our city, focusing on fields as well as forms of teaching, learning, and scholarship that highlight innovation, personal and social progress, and opportunities for careers and service

Our Guiding Concepts

Flexibility, Equity, Community, Accessibility

The Strategic Planning Steering Committee began its work by identifying concepts that could serve as touchstones. These concepts would focus and energize every area of the plan.

Flexibility

• Meeting our students where they are with what they need

• Being responsive to emerging needs in the workforce and the world

• Listening to our own staff and faculty about what they require and what they are seeing or expecting

Equity

• Being true to our founding commitment to access and opportunity

• Being a force for addressing issues of social justice in our instruction, in our student support, in our management of staff and faculty—to focus locally as well as globally

• Being self-critical about blind spots like unconscious bias and structural or institutionalized inequities reflected in hiring, pay, and rank

Community

• Fostering productive and supportive community at every level—the classroom, the program, the organizational unit, the School, the city, the state, the world

• Realizing and resisting the barriers to community: isolation, compartmentalization, silos, and hierarchies

• Committing to a vision of collaboration across units, of learning from each other

Accessibility

• Committing to holding the door open to opportunity, easing entry, and providing support

• Acknowledging that getting through the door is only the first step and that the commitment must be to student success as well as student access

• Understanding that this is also a commitment to post-graduate success, to ensuring access to good jobs and upward mobility