Queensborough Community College was recently awarded a $1.6 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This grant was given as an extension from an already fruitful partnership with the NIH and the CUNY school system to help students working towards their associate’s degrees to earn their bachelor’s degrees and in many cases, both their doctoral and medical degrees. The NIH’s Bridges To Baccalaureate program is a partnership established between Queensborough, Queens College and City College to achieve the long-term goals of improving Queensborough’s ability to train and graduate under-represented science students and to facilitate their transfer to baccalaureate programs in biomedicine or behavioral science.
The Bridges to Baccalaureate program – Helping you elevate your degree
“The National Institutes of Health has consistently awarded these five-year grants to CUNY for a quarter-century, but the student experience provides a far richer illustration of the impact,” said Interim Chancellor Vita C. Rabinowitz in CUNY press release. “The program’s success,” she added, “can be observed in the hundreds of CUNY students, primarily those from underrepresented groups, who have completed associate’s degrees, continued their science education at CUNY senior colleges and later launched their careers.”
With this extension of the Bridges to Baccalaureate, both the NIH and the CUNY school system are showing a tremendous dedication to lifting students out of their circumstances to pursue careers in fields that could ultimately save lives while breaking the cycles of poverty and racial bias within the college system.
“Community college students typically don’t see themselves going beyond two-year degrees, and the important thing this program does is open them to bigger possibilities,” said Hendrick Delcham, a professor of natural and applied sciences who oversees the program at LaGuardia in the same CUNY press release. “It gets them to think not only about four-year degrees but far beyond. It allows the faculty to involve students in their research, and that gets them to think about science as a career path.”
In fact, since 1993, 700 students have taken advantage of the programs at Queensborough, LaGuardia, and City Tech. As a result, half of those students have earned their bachelor’s degrees. This is almost four times the rate of students who pursue their bachelor’s degrees after earning their associates without any assistance. Many of those students have also gone on to earn either their medical degrees or their P.h.D.s.
For more information on how you can help elevate your degree with the Bridges to Baccalaureate program, head over to bridges.citytech.cuny.edu.
