Baruch College Awarded Major Federal Grant to Advance AI Literacy and Applied Learning

Baruch College Awarded Major Federal Grant to Advance AI Literacy and Applied Learning

October 6, 2026

Baruch College has been awarded $776,033 in first-year (FY 2026) funding through the federal Title III, Part A Strengthening Institutions Program (SIP). The program is administered by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education.

The award will accelerate the Baruch AI Leadership Initiative, the College's coordinated effort to build shared institutional capacity for responsible AI learning and applied experience for Baruch students, faculty and staff development, and active engagement with the professional community. The funding will help prepare students for an increasingly AI-enabled workforce while strengthening academic quality and Baruch's capacity to serve students from all backgrounds.

"Baruch launched the AI Leadership Initiative with a clear goal: to ensure that our students can use AI not only skillfully, but also with strong disciplinary knowledge, sound judgment, and a clear sense of responsibility," said Baruch College President S. David Wu. "This federal award is important national recognition of that vision and gives us momentum to move from design to implementation. It will help us expand AI learning across the curriculum, strengthen our faculty and staff, and create more opportunities for students to apply their knowledge to real problems through the AI Learning Commons and Applied Intelligence Lab."

"Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing both the workplace and how colleges teach, learn, and support students," said Linda Essig, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. "This grant will help faculty and staff develop the knowledge, tools, and confidence to integrate AI thoughtfully into their work, while giving students structured opportunities to build practical skills and exercise human judgment across disciplines."

Moving from Design to College-Wide Implementation

The $776,033 first-year award is Baruch's first federal grant devoted to scaling AI literacy across the curricula of its three schools. It will support interconnected work in curriculum development, faculty and staff preparation, applied learning, and student services.

During the first year, faculty and staff fellows will develop modular learning resources that can be integrated into general education, core coursework, and selected majors with strong labor-market relevance. Through AI Practice Fellows Program-a train-the-trainer model-these participants will go through rigorous training to help colleagues to adopt effective practices across departments and programs. This approach will build distributed institutional capacity rather than concentrating AI expertise within a single office or team.

The curriculum will combine foundational understanding with practical skills and responsible use. Students will learn to evaluate AI-generated output, identify misinformation and disinformation, recognize bias, protect privacy, understand ethical risks, and determine when human judgment must take precedence.

Expanding the AI Learning Commons

The AI Learning Commons is one of the two principal components of the Baruch AI Leadership Initiative. It provides shared curricula, learning pathways, tools, cases, policies, and practical resources that faculty, staff, and students can use across disciplines and professional fields.

The Commons entered its pre-launch stage in fall 2026, with materials being piloted in selected courses. The federal grant will allow Baruch to expand these resources and make them available more broadly across the College.

Grant-supported learning materials will be organized through the Commons and continually refreshed based on faculty and student feedback, assessment results, advances in AI, changing workforce needs, and lessons emerging from applied projects.

Advancing the Applied Intelligence Lab

Funding will also advance the development of the Applied Intelligence Lab, the Initiative's supervised environment for applied learning and project work.

The Lab will provide appropriately prepared students with opportunities to put their knowledge into practice through hands-on projects, portfolios, capstones, and other forms of experiential learning. It will also provide controlled settings in which AI tools, workflows, and approaches can be tested and evaluated responsibly.

The Lab and the AI Learning Commons will remain distinct but closely connected. The Commons will provide the curricula, tools, standards, and learning resources that support the Lab's work. In turn, lessons from Lab projects will be developed into reusable cases, workflows, and instructional materials that strengthen the Commons and benefit the broader College community.

Bringing Responsible AI to Student Services

The project will also support the responsible use of AI in student services. Faculty and staff will receive training in AI-assisted approaches to tutoring, advising, career navigation, and other areas of student support.

Human judgment and oversight will remain integral to the model. AI will be used to extend and strengthen Baruch's existing academic and career-development services-not to replace the professional expertise and personal relationships on which students rely.

Building on Baruch's AI Momentum

The federal grant builds on a range of AI initiatives already underway across Baruch. President Wu launched the Baruch AI Leadership Initiative in spring 2026 to create a practical, institutionally grounded framework for integrating AI across teaching, learning, research, administration, and applied experience. Its Campus Core Team brings together faculty, staff, students, technology leaders, and academic administrators from across the College.

The CUNY AI Innovation Fund is also supporting eight multidisciplinary projects at Baruch led by faculty, staff, and administrators. These projects promote research, curriculum innovation, operational improvement, and student success while complementing existing efforts such as the AI Think Tank, the Cross-College Committee on AI Curriculum Development, the Copilot Community of Practice, and the AI Resource Hub.

Professor Mahima Hada, Faculty Director of the Baruch AI Leadership Initiative, will lead implementation of the federal grant in coordination with the Office of the Provost, the Campus Core Team, and academic and administrative partners across the College.