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LaGuardia Community College

LaGuardia Community College’s students, faculty, and staff have demonstrated the courage to question, the drive to experiment and the will to change, every day, both inside and outside the classroom, since 1971. Our mission, then, as now, reflects our original charge handed down to us from CUNY: to open the doors of higher education to all, ensuring access to underserved and underprepared populations.

Today, 60,000 students who hail from 160 countries, and speak 127 languages are enrolled at LaGuardia. The College offers 59 associate degree programs in the liberal arts and sciences, business and computer science and allied health, as well as four certificate programs. Located in Long Island City, Queens –New York’s most diverse borough- the college is located ten minutes by subway from Times Square and just minutes from Brooklyn.

LaGuardia graduates transfer to four-year colleges at triple the national rate, and family income increases an average of 17% upon graduation. Fifty-four percent of our faculty holds Ph.D.s, more than twice that of faculty at most community colleges.laguardia_community_college_of_the_city_university_of_new_york2.jpg

The College’s Adult and Continuing Education Division (ACE) is the largest in CUNY, and among the largest in the country.  ACE’s award-winning ESL instructors, GED-to-college bridge programs and immigrant retraining and health practitioner licensure courses provide a pathway for adult learners to change their lives and that of their families for the better.

As the first community college chosen in 2010 by Goldman Sachs to participate in 10,000 Small Businesses, a five-year initiative developed to help small businesses across the U.S. grow and create jobs, LaGuardia has helped 82 businesses create 194 new jobs, secure 15 loans totaling $3.9 million and negotiate 82 new contracts totaling $39 million.

Other recent College accolades include recognition in 2009 by Excelencia in Education for exemplary leadership in serving the needs of Latino and nontraditional-age students. In 2006, the MetLife Foundation named LaGuardia one of two Community Colleges of Excellence in the U.S. Since 2007, the College’s innovative ePortfolio program -cited for excellence by the Carnegie Foundation and the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2004- has received over $4 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education to teach two-and four year institutions nationwide how to introduce ePortfolio into their curricula. The College has been a winner of CUNY’s Sustainability Award for environmentally friendly best practices on campus since its inception in 2008.

laguardia_community_college_of_the_city_university_of_new_york3.jpgLaGuardia continues to seek innovative solutions to such issues as improving retention and graduation rates, designing creative pedagogies that will lift students’ basic skills pass rates, expanding academic advising services and utilizing technology to ensure a seamless transfer experience, whether within CUNY or to other four-year colleges and universities, for our students.

Enrollment in degree programs has soared almost 30% in the last five years. The campus comprises four buildings, over 1.7 million square feet, which includes over 100,000 square feet of laboratories, a 750 seat theater, six-lane NCAA regulation size swimming pool, fitness center, sports gymnasium, tennis court and the Archives of New York Mayors LaGuardia, Wagner, Beame, Koch and the New York City Council.

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