Baruch College has a robust and burgeoning suite of research projects and arts and sciences degree programs, which more students should know about.
While Baruch College has an understandable focus on business due to its origins, reputation and student body, it should do more to highlight the impactful research, initiatives and opportunities happening in other disciplines, like the sciences and humanities.
Both the Weissman School of Arts and Science and the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs have grown in recent years, but communication CUNY-wide has relegated Baruch’s accomplishments to its Zicklin School of Business.
CUNY’s official Instagram account shared a post on work from Laguardia Community College at Newton Creek, where students and professors installed wetland frames to support native saltmarsh grasses.
What the post didn’t share was that the work incorporated assistance from both Baruch faculty as well as from Brooklyn College, as seen in the authorship of the article published in the Journal of Environmental Quality.
Baruch has measured up to its sister colleges with a diverse range of research and initiatives. At the inaugural CUNY Celebration of Undergraduate Research on May 31, Baruch was represented among the most from the university system with 10 poster presentations.
According to data from Fall 2022 out of Baruch’s Office of Institutional Research, the Zicklin to Weissman student ratio was about 3.39, a commendable leap from the 10 to one application ratio in 1970.
Weissman Dean Jessica Lang shared concerns with The Ticker, highlighting the need for further communication from faculty and administrators to measure up to this new growth. But Baruch’s faculty also cited limited time and resources, leading to limited communications, and professors engaged in active research can’t prioritize social media posts and other outreach materials.
However, faculty at the Weissman School conceded that Baruch’s allocation of resources leaves less for natural science for good reason. Baruch is historically a business school — one of the best in the country.
Data from Niche.com revealed that Baruch’s five most popular majors are Accounting, Merchandising and Buying Operations, Corporate Communications, Information Science and Business.
This distribution of majors has several possible explanations, not limited to the college’s origins and reputation in addition to its major-specific resources — all the more reason to bolster Baruch’s science and humanities endeavors.
The academic experience at Baruch will only be as transformational for arts and sciences students as Zicklin students when the school sees a dramatic increase in interdisciplinary communication, a more balanced allocation of resources and the implementation of student-led initiatives to promote science and humanities departments.
