City College Board of Trustees convened on Thursday, Sept. 12 with a full agenda that featured concerns from the Academic Senate about fraudulent bot enrollment, followed by presentations on the 2024-25 adopted budget and 2024 educational vision plan.
Academic Senate President Joshua Ramirez addressed the growing concern of fraudulent bot enrollments, specifically in asynchronous and late-start classes–including ways that faculty can take precautionary measures against their own classes being filled by bots.
“The methods by which enrollment fraud is conducted has grown more sophisticated,” Ramirez said. “But we too have our own methods for being able to detect them.”
Ramirez expressed his gratitude towards the collective efforts of Assistant Superintendent and Vice President of Student Services Paloma Arnold, Assistant Superintendent and Vice President of Academic Affairs María Villagómez, Admissions and Records, I.T. and the financial aid department to resolve and address this dilemma from all angles.
“This is an extremely challenging issue and it’s so nice to hear you’re all working together on this,” Board President Jonathan Abboud said. “This is a top priority for the board to support cybersecurity efforts on campus.”
Trustee Anna Everett weighed in on the issue, highlighting that City College is not the only institution facing the infiltration of fraudulent bot enrollments and cybersecurity threats.
“We are not the only ones that are victims to this,” Everett said. “This is definitely something that is occurring beyond just higher education.”
Looking beyond cybersecurity issues, Interim Assistant Superintendent and Vice President of Business Services Brian Fahnestock presented the 2024-25 adopted budget to the board on Thursday.
Fahnestock addressed a budgeting mistake which resulted in a discovery of an estimated $3.9 million in additional revenue. This money derives from a variety of sources, including high interest rates and lottery funds from the states.
“It’s very good news actually,” Fahnestock said.
The current budget is still not finalized but the discovery of additional revenue has provided substantial comfort regarding budget concerns.
“We are still not closed unfortunately, but we have good numbers in many of the areas we did not have before,” Fahnestock said.
In 2023, City College fulfilled its 2023 Strategic Plan, according to adminstrators.
Villagómez and Arnold, along with Vice President of the School of Extended learning Carola Smith, and Executive Director of the Office of Institutional Assessment, Research, and Planning Keller Magenau presented the 2024 Educational Vision Plan to the Board on Thursday.
The purpose of the 2023 Strategic Plan was to outline specific goals that shape City College as an institution. Villagómez, Arnold, Smith and Magenau explained this new vision plan now serves to put plans into action to enhance the experience of City College students.
“To me, the through line on all of this is serving students,” Trustee Robert K. Miller said. “It’s making it easier to get students in the door, enrolling, focusing on helping them complete their education course, helping them get a job or on to a four year institution. It’s really clearly student oriented.”
One of the examples of enhancing student success on campus is in the form of a physical testing center so students don’t have to venture far away from City College to be proctored for a test.
“Students would be able to show up in person and be proctored during the time that they’re taking their exams,” Villagómez said. “It is an aspiration of ours to model the testing center or explore the feasibility of that.”
The board will meet again on Thursday, Oct. 10.
Correction: Sept. 16, 2024
A previous version of this story misspelled Keller Magenau’s last name as “Maenau.” The Channels regrets this error. In addition a few grammatical errors were fixed.
