Why another university could benefit New York

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at why one think tank says New York City needs another university. We also get details about Donald Trump’s efforts to secure a $550+ million bail bond in his civil fraud case.

Of all the things New York City needs right now, is another private university one of them?

Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan think tank, said the answer was yes “because we are in a different economic environment, post-pandemic.”

“If there was anything that could derail the city’s economic progress,” he told me, “it would be a decline in the number of students moving to the city. Remote work, along with the city’s affordability crisis, has created that opportunity. One way to combat that is to expand the flow of people coming here before they even get a degree.”

Going to college in New York would increase the likelihood that graduates would seek and find their first job in the city, he said. “If you look at the city’s economic success over the past decades, nothing has been more important than attracting and retaining highly skilled people,” he says. “Companies needed to be here because the talent base was here, even if it meant paying the city’s high real estate prices and taxes.”

The connection between the university and the economy is so important that a report from the center says City Hall should find city-owned land and commit to providing $100 million for a new campus.

The college idea was one of five in a report from the center on ways the city can do well given the economic realities left behind by the pandemic. The center’s report notes that the city is lagging in several economic sectors, with only 57 percent of retail jobs lost during the pandemic having returned. The city has regained the same number of jobs that were lost during the pandemicbut many of the new jobs are in lower-paying sectors.

The center’s report comes as state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli warns of a ‘looming enrollment cliff’, partly because the U.S. college population is expected to decline early next year.

Focusing on potential economic benefits, Bowles said opening a major academic institution would create hundreds, if not thousands, of new jobs before the first students arrived, from administrators and teachers to construction and food service workers.

“Indeed,” the center’s report said, “colleges and universities are perhaps the city’s most undervalued job drivers.” Colleges and universities account for 3.5 percent of the city’s jobs, nearly double the share in the 1990s, the report said.

Bowles said other statistics indicate a new college or university could begin to address the problem. Last year, more than 120,000 prospective students applied to New York University, and he said about 15,000 of them accepted. Columbia University admitted just over 2,200 of its 57,000 applicants.

That left nearly 160,000 people who were considering studying in New York, even if they only gave it a cursory thought as they filled out one application after another. Still, the lure of New York may be enough to lure them to a new institution. “We want more of those top high school students to come to New York to study here and then stay and fuel the industries of the future,” Bowles said.

The number of private students pales in comparison to the 226,000 students who attend the 25 campuses of the City University of New York.

Bowles listed a number of possible locations for a new campus, including Sunnyside Yards, a 400-acre rail yard and a potential development site in western Queens. But, he added, “my suggestion is not to start by saying, ‘This is where we know it should be.’”

Weather

Today will be mostly sunny with highs around 49 degrees. In the evening temperatures drop below 40 degrees.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until Sunday (Purim).

The latest New York news

Remember the old-fashioned paper checks? Imagine one for $557,491,716. On the line below the “pay in order of” line, the amount would be written out in words: five hundred and fifty-seven million, four hundred and ninety-one thousand, seven hundred and sixteen dollars.

That’s how much Donald Trump needs for bail in Manhattan civil fraud case. His lawyers said Monday that 30 companies had rejected him. Apparently he does not have sufficient liquidity.

The amount is higher than the $454 million judgment in the case to take into account the interest Trump will owe. Trump’s lawyers have asked an appeals court to suspend the sentence or accept bail of just $100 million. Otherwise, the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case against Trump, could take action to collect the money, raising the possibility that the state could freeze some of his bank accounts and seize a number of his properties.

The attorney general, Letitia James, could have done this as soon as Judge Arthur Engoron issued his ruling last month after finding that Trump had fraudulently inflated his assets to obtain loans and other benefits. But she offered a 30-day extension until March 25. It is unclear whether the appeals court will rule on what amounts to a request for relief before then. It is also unclear whether James will give Trump any more time.

Included in Trump’s lawyers’ files was a document from Gary Giulietti, an executive at the Lockton Companies, which he said was the world’s largest private insurance brokerage. Giulietti said he was hired by Trump.

“While I understand that the Trump Organization is in a strong liquidity position, it does not have $1 billion in cash or cash equivalents,” Giulietti wrote. “As a result, obtaining a $464 million bond is a practical impossibility for a company like the Trump Organization, which has invested the majority of its assets in real estate.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Sand sculptures

Dear Diary:

I saw an older man and his wife every summer at the lighthouse on Fire Island: he, shirtless and wearing Bermuda shorts, she in a floppy pink straw hat.

The man made two or three sand sculptures of classically designed, voluptuous women, with seaweed for hair and shells for fingernails. Hundreds of people a day walked by and admired his work.

The couple had been coming to the beach since the 1960s. We said a few words and talked more and more as the years passed.

They were both around 80. They arrived in the morning and left at 2pm. The late afternoon waves would erase the man’s creations, and he would return the following week with new ones.

Summer would fade and it would be eight to nine months before we returned. If we did that, he would make his art there.

We had grown up in Brooklyn, decades apart. We talked about our lives, our health, the pains and regrets of growing older. I told them about our son, who had died in a car accident. They were silent and dejected.

On my last day there one summer, they were collecting their belongings, the man’s wife waved and he shrugged. They walked away, hand in hand.

The following summer there was no trace of them. What became of them was a mystery. People walked back and forth where he sat as the ocean washed in and out.

– Joseph P. Griffith

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send your entries here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. – JB

PS Here is today’s Mini crossword And Game competition. You can find all our puzzles here.