Amazin’. With baseball season around the corner, the philanthropic foundation of Mets owner Steve Cohen and his wife Alexandra Cohen has swung for the fences and connected — with a $116 million gift to CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College setting up the Cohen Career Collective, intended when it’s set to open in 2029 to be the biggest career and technical training center in the city and its environs.
That’s a lot of money, the most anyone has ever given to the nation’s largest urban higher education institution, and it’s going not to bulk up a high-prestige academic program or fund a research initiative.
As important as those objectives would be, the goal here is pure pragmatics: to prepare thousands of people of limited means for high-quality, well paying jobs in fast-growing fields to give them a solid foothold in the middle class. We can’t think of a worthier project.
Two-year community and technical colleges are what Opportunity America calls “the indispensable institution,” because of how they connect young people and mid-career professionals alike to the skills and training they need to support themselves and their families.
In New York, CUNY’s seven community colleges are often overshadowed in the public mind by the system’s 12 four-year schools. But Bronx, Guttman, Hostos, Kingsborough, Queensborough, LaGuardia and the Borough of Manhattan Community Colleges together educate more than 70,000 students.
Their value is especially high when the economic winds are shifting, as they are today, with work-from-home and AI and who knows what’s next.
Yet of late many of their students have been scraping by — and as essential as they are to so many New Yorkers, CUNY’s community colleges hadn’t made as hard or as fast a turn as colleges elsewhere have to prepare people for the world of work.
The Cohen infusion will make a huge difference, and fittingly, these career expectations will rise across 160,00 square feet in the former Sunshine Biscuit Factory, long known as the largest bakery in the world and of late and recently called LaGuardia Community College C-Building in Long Island City.
If Amazon had gone through with putting half of its second headquarters just across the tracks in the Queens neighborhood rather than getting run out of town by local demagogues, the synergy would’ve been especially terrific. But we digress.
Say what you will about the Mets or Steve Cohen, who made his billions in the hedge fund game and is currently jockeying to open a casino at Citi Field. Through their foundation, he and Alexandra have given wisely to combat the spread of tick-borne illnesses, help feed and educate and deliver quality health care to young people, boost the arts and more. The foundation says $185 million in its charitable support has been focused on Queens.
New York City’s future is bound up in sectors like health care, technology, construction, hospitality and energy, which are inextricably linked to one another. If companies can find quality local talent to do a wide range of jobs, they’re likelier to thrive here — and so are the people who work for them.
The Cohens have just made it many times likelier that prosperity in the nation’s biggest city will be shared. Even if the Mets have a lousy year, that’s a huge bold W.
