City Awards Grant to CUNY SPS for Computer System Upgrade

The CUNY School of Professional Studies (CUNY SPS) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a Resolution A (RESO-A) capital grant of $100,000 from the Office of the Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer for the 2021 fiscal year. This grant will be applied towards expanding the School’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), a major hardware and software upgrade the School is currently implementing to ensure that students and faculty in new data-driven programs get the highest quality computing power and experience.

“We are so excited to receive this funding, especially since in prior years, we didn’t really know what our chances of being awarded discretionary capital funds might be,” said Bronwen Stine, Assistant Dean of Information Technology at CUNY SPS, who spearheaded the grant along with Washington Hernandez, Associate Dean of Administration and Finance. “This infrastructure will allow us to provide sophisticated statistical and programming tools for our students, with resources that are competitive with those available at private institutions. Our faculty will have the ability to design relevant and challenging curricula that’s responsive to current developments in the areas of data analytics and informatics. Most importantly, our students will have access to tools that will directly help them to prepare for jobs in increasingly high-tech fields that rely on data literacy, where the demand for skilled employees is steadily growing.”

As the pioneer in online education for more than 15 years, CUNY SPS has a track record of providing robust, redundant, highly available, and high-performance virtual computing environments to students in its online information technology and data science programs. With this new investment in VDI infrastructure, CUNY SPS will be able to extend these computing facilities to additional disciplines, including healthcare, psychology, and sociology, all of which feature growing data analytics practices. In addition to extending VDI to new programs, CUNY SPS will also now be able to provide persistent storage, large sample data sets, and access to statistical and analytics software throughout the semester. With the addition of the RESO-A funds, CUNY SPS expects to complete the purchases and finalize the VDI services upgrade by Spring 2021. 

The RESO-A award is offered through NYC CapGrant, a city government program that provides non-profit organizations with grants for capital projects that improve upon their own property. This funding is offered either by the City Council Office and/or the Office of the Borough President in the borough that the non-profit organization resides in. For more information, visit the NYC CapGrant website.

About the CUNY School of Professional Studies

For over 15 years, the CUNY School of Professional Studies (CUNY SPS) has been leading online education in New York. Offering the most fully online Bachelor’s and Master’s degree options at the City University of New York, CUNY SPS meets the needs of adults who are looking to finish a bachelor’s degree, progress from an associate’s degree, earn a master’s degree or certificate in a specialized field, and advance in the workplace or change careers.

The School’s growth has been remarkable, with twenty-four degrees launched since 2006. Enrollment has risen by more than 30% in the last four years to over 4,000 students in the credit-bearing programs and thousands more who are enrolled in non-degree and grant-funded workplace learning programs. In addition, the School has an active Alumni network and has established the CUNY SPS Foundation, which offers multiple scholarship opportunities to current students.

CUNY SPS has been ranked in the nation’s top 5% by U.S. News & World Report for the past six years, most recently in its list of the 2020 Best Online Bachelor’s Degree Programs, making CUNY SPS the highest nationally listed program in New York State and New York City.

Press Contact:
Andrea Fagon
Director of Marketing and Communications
andrea.fagon@cuny.edu