Aspen Institute Forum Showcases Baruch College Initiatives

Aspen Institute Forum Showcases Baruch College Initiatives

November 3, 2025

Held during Aspen Institute's 75^th anniversary year, the nationally prominent Aspen Ideas Forum brought together experts from around the country to discuss today's economy.

The October 21 session explored how scaling higher education best practices can generate the educated workforce needed to drive the region's economy. Pascale Charlot, director of the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, opened the discussion by outlining the complex challenges contributing to a projected shortfall of 4.6 million educated workers by 2030.

She noted that only 16 percent of community college students currently go on to earn a four-year degree, despite their aspirations.

A Mind Shift at Baruch

Representing Baruch College, Kannan Mohan, PhD, associate dean at the Zicklin School of Business, described the College's innovative and transformational programming to expand student success.

In detailing the steps that Baruch took to address this situation, he emphasized the need for a shift in mindset in higher education from student-readiness to institutional-readiness.

According to Mohan, it was incumbent upon institutions to ensure that they were "student ready" by developing the necessary student support systems to foster the sense of belonging, support timely degree completion and strong post-graduate outcomes. To achieve this, Baruch conducted a deep dive into the data, a hard look at their prevailing approaches and collaborative conversations with faculty and their partners at CUNY community colleges.

Baruch Business Academy

From this reflection, Baruch faculty and administration set targets and milestones and launched the Baruch Business Academy in 2021. This program streamlines the transfer process for participating students from six community colleges of The City University of New York to Baruch and integrates world-class career services support at the start of their academic journey.

Within the next year, the Business Academy is slated to serve over 1,000 students, with the first graduates already having secured top-flight positions at Fortune 200 firms like Deloitte and BNY. When asked about the genesis of this program and this new "student-ready" approach, Mohan pointed to the importance of openness to innovation and change.

Data-Informed Approach

Reflecting on his early days in the position, Mohan noted that rather than accepting traditional practices at face value, he encouraged his team to embrace a data-informed approach, continually questioning how institutional decisions could be better guided by evidence and focused on improving student outcomes.

"At Baruch, we have a team that has this mindset, a commitment to following the data to effect real change, scale up our work and prepare students for success not just now but 10, 15 years in the future."

# # #