CUNY Schools

                Having completed the flagship schools, I turn my attention to the localities where I have found the least use of Friday.  Columbia in New York City has the least use of Friday in the Ivy League.  So I turned my attention to the CUNY schools to see how these less selective schools rate this way.  Generally these schools don’t use Friday much either. (All observations are from Spring 014). Their courses are mostly MW or TTh or one day, occasionally on Friday but just as often on Saturday or Sunday.  If I encounter a weekend course, I count it as a Friday one, but even counting this way, these schools have few courses that meet on "Friday."  Some of the CUNY senior schools go back a long way and are more prestigious and others are relatively new.  Here are the schools and their percentages of courses that meet on Friday (or the weekend) from oldest to newest.  (Thanks to Wikipedia from which I copied this display and added my data)

. (1847) City College 22 % F's, with pockets of more traditional F's in physics and some languages

.  (1870) Hunter College 34 % F's, higher than others around due frequency of TF, mostly

.  (1919) Baruch College 15 % F's, typical CUNY mix of 3 hr F, Sa and Su (as City College’s School of Business and Civic Administration, renamed in 1953 to honor Bernard M. Baruch)

.  (1930) Brooklyn College 11 % F's, typical CUNY(formed by the merger of Hunter and City Colleges' Brooklyn campuses)

.  (1937) Queens College 23 % F's, typical CUNY

.  (1955) College of Staten Island  23 % F's, typical CUNY

.  (1964) John Jay College of Criminal Justice 14 % F's, a few TF and ThF here

.  (1966) York College 25 % F's, a few sciences have traditional MWF

.  (1968) Lehman College 13 % F's, typical CUNY (from (1931) Lehman was the Bronx branch of Hunter College, known as Hunter-in-the-Bronx)

.  (1970) Medgar Evers College 30 % F's, math is almost all F, some TThF here

                The oldest and newest of these schools make the most use of Friday, which is still rather low compared to traditional schools.  The lowest use of F's is still better than in Los Angeles but still rather low.  As in LA, these schools may say that they have four day weeks so commuting time is reduced.  Maybe so, but what accounts for the range of this use?  Whatever the explanation, the quality of education looks  lower at schools that pack their classes into a four day week and when possible it seems wise for a student to choose and employers to hire from a school that looks like it cares more about quality.

            Here’s a suggestion for big city schools:  keep your four day week for commuting purposes, but spread it out.  Have MTh and TF classes.  Let Wednesday be the open day, where perhaps some one day classes meet and when students are more inclined to study.