3. Project Setting
Queens College, founded in 1937, is an academically solid and inexpensive local college where capable students from all backgrounds can obtain an excellent education.[1] Currently enrolling over 18,000, Queens College is a major source of students who obtain academic doctorates. Since the College's first class graduated in 1941, approximately 3,400 students (of some 91,000 graduates) have earned this degree. More than 1200 of these have been women; a substantial number of doctorates have come from minority backgrounds. A report from the National Research Council indicates that in 1992 Queens College ranked 24th in the country as a source of women doctorates, just ahead of Northwestern University, UC-Santa Barbara, and Smith College.[2] No similarly precise figures are available concerning minorities, but the College's minority enrollment is large and growing. More than 80% of the student body is from the polyglot borough of Queens: among over 50 ethnic groups, students are black, Hispanic, Indian, Pakistani, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Italian, Greek, and both European and Israeli Jews.
The Sociology Department (Queens Sociology) currently has 27 full-time faculty, 3,400 student enrollments per term, and a rapidly increasing number of majors -- currently over 920. This makes it among the top five departments in the country in terms of granting sociology B.A.’s. Queens Sociology prides itself on both the academic and research achievements of its faculty and students, and on its commitment to high quality undergraduate teaching. The department was applauded in Fiske's 1998 Comparative College Guide, while Queens College as a whole was given a "four star" academic rating. Queens Sociology faculty expertise encompasses the wide breadth of the discipline. Most carry on active research programs that have resulted in national recognition in the form of NSF, NEH, American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, Guggenheim and other national and international awards. Department members are active and hold office in national and regional professional societies and associations. Their scholarly work appears regularly in major journals and in books and monographs published by leading scholarly presses.
Queens Sociology is also a leader in undergraduate teaching. Even though no student is required to take a sociology course, the department has the second largest enrollments of the 32 undergraduate departments in the college, after English and ahead of Mathematics. In line with the national The number of our majors is has seen large recent increases, much sharper than the national trend. We believe that in part this is due to our success in providing more laboratory-based empirical training than any other social science department at the College.
This training has quite visibly led to job placements and graduate school admissions. Over 150 Queens graduates have earned a doctorate in Sociology or a closely-related field. Our students represent a significant pool of potential scientists, many of whom are women or members of racial and ethnic minorities. Furthermore, many of our graduates become teachers of racial or ethnic minorities in secondary and elementary schools in New York City, where solid training in critical thinking skills is sorely needed. Finally, we have many students who return to complete their college education after working for a number of years.
The Queens Sociology curriculum is similar to that at many publicly supported liberal arts schools. There is a difference of scale, in that the numbers of faculty and enrollments are considerably higher than in most colleges. All majors are required to take Introductory Sociology, which attracts many other students since it satisfies one of the general education requirements for the B.A. Majors are also required to take each of the following courses: Sociological Analysis, Sociological Theory, Social Statistics, and Social Research Methods. They fill out their programs with four electives and a seminar chosen from an array of some 25-30 courses.
[1]The City University of New York was created in 1961 when Queens College along with other New York City public colleges, such as City, Hunter, and Brooklyn were assembled into a federated institution. CUNY now consists of 21 branches including nine four year colleges, eight community colleges, a law school, two medical schools, and a graduate school. Recent figures place CUNY's total enrollment at over 200,000 students, making it the largest urban university in the country.
[2]Summary Report, 1992 Doctorate Recipients From United States Universities. Washington D.C.: National Academic Press, 1994, p.21.