New York’s higher education sector is facing challenges, including a looming enrollment cliff, growing costs of attendance, and rising student debt. This report provides critical indicators on the competitiveness of higher education institutions, explains their major challenges, and offers recommendations for consideration. Keeping New York’s higher education institutions competitive by ensuring their affordability, diversity and spirit of innovation and community is important for our State’s future.

This snapshot highlights the Fiscal Stress Monitoring System (FSMS) results for school districts that reported for school fiscal year (SY) 2022-23, which ended on June 30, 2023. Increases to federal pandemic relief aid and the State fully funding foundation aid kept many districts out of a stress designation. For SY 2022-23, sixteen school districts were designated as being in stress—the second-lowest number since the system was created. The report also includes a look at districts that have been chronically stressed over the eleven years since FSMS began.

This report examines comparative data for 10 rural counties in New York to identify challenges faced by these communities and others like them, as well as opportunities. Population, employment, housing and other trends were considered, and these findings can be used as a baseline from which future trends can be measured. The median age of people living in these 10 rural counties increased at nearly twice the rate of the State between 2011 and 2021 while simultaneously population numbers declined.

This snapshot highlights the FSMS results for school districts that reported for school fiscal year (SY) 2021-22, which ended on June 30, 2022.  Fewer school districts were scored in fiscal stress in this year than any other year since the System’s inception largely due to increases in State aid and temporary federal aid.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced New York’s schools to take on the extraordinary challenge of quickly shifting to remote learning formats. Recent national data show student performance dropped significantly in 2022 from 2019, with New York experiencing even greater declines than the nation in fourth grade math and reading. School districts need to swiftly invest significant resources in helping students that are most in need to make up for learning loss, while pandemic relief funds for education are still available.

New York’s "Big Five" school districts in New York City, Yonkers, Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester received $8.6 billion in federal pandemic relief funds, but there are sizeable differences in how school districts are using the funds. New York City has directed a smaller share of its total allocation toward addressing the academic impacts of the pandemic. The City, and all districts, can improve reporting linking educational outcomes for all of its students with their use of these historic federal education funds.

This snapshot highlights the FSMS results for school districts that reported for the school year (SY) ending on June 30, 2021. It also discusses the challenges that school districts faced in SY 2020-21, the first full year of operations under pandemic conditions.

This snapshot highlights the FSMS results for school districts that reported for school fiscal year (SY) 2019-20, which ended on June 30, 2020, which included the period of the statewide mandatory school shutdown from March 18 through the end of the school year. The snapshot also discusses some of the major fiscal stress risk factors posed by the pandemic for school districts in SY 2020-21 (not yet scored).

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the face of education across the country and in New York City, the nation’s largest public school system. During the pandemic, the City had to develop and implement novel remote learning protocols to continue educating students. Extraordinary levels of federal aid allowed the City to overcome these obstacles and implement a number of new initiatives to help students and address learning losses.

New York students with disabilities lost partial or full special education services because of school shutdowns and the shift to remote learning during the pandemic, likely exacerbating pre-existing achievement gaps. School districts should prioritize address learning loss for these students in their re-opening plans.