The Power of Yes

A sought-after fashion model studies economics and launches her own skincare brand. An EMT and waiter who enters college as an older student becomes a journalist for Dow Jones and Bloomberg News, covering more than 17 countries. A veteran of the Marine Corps in Iraq fulfills a lifelong dream of becoming a physician. These exemplify the thousands of transformations that Columbia School of General Studies has helped make possible for nontraditional students. Yet perhaps the biggest story of transformation is that of GS itself. In the first 25 years of this century, GS has evolved from a small Columbia extension school largely unknown outside New York City into the global standard-bearer for the Ivy League education of nontraditional students.

Much of this transformation can be credited to the late Dean Emeritus Peter J. Awn’s 20-year tenure (1997-2017). Awn saw the enormous potential in highly capable career changers, veterans, and students whose education had been interrupted. He worked to ensure they were fully integrated into Columbia’s academic and student life and helped define what GS has become: a school with a habit of saying “yes”—not casually, but intentionally. “Yes” to the value of lived experience. “Yes” to the conviction that GS students belong in the same classrooms and are held to the same standards as their Columbia peers. As early as 2001, along with Vice Dean Curtis Rodgers and his small leadership team, Awn began developing a plan to more fully realize the School’s mission to empower these resilient and talented learners and expand their access to elite education.

25 Years of Reimagining What’s Possible

Launched in 2005, Past History, Current Reality & Plan for the Next Decade (2005- 2015) laid out Awn’s road map for growing enrollment, increasing tuition revenue, and investing in operations—starting with admissions, moving on to student affairs, and eventually focusing on alumni development. In announcing that he would step down after 20 years of service, Awn credited Rodgers—who has been with GS throughout its transformative quarter century—as “the architect of most of our successful initiatives.” Rodgers says the School’s culture of growth and innovation also depends on a willingness to say, “Yes, let’s consider this,” as possibilities emerge. “The questions we ask,” he said, “are ‘Is this good for students? Is this good for the School? Does this bring to Columbia a student who otherwise wouldn’t be here?’”

In taking the baton from Awn, Dean Lisa Rosen-Metsch ’90 has built on the School’s sound footing and instituted innovative ways to further support and enrich students. Saying “yes” to the potential of nontraditional students means removing the financial barriers they face, and Rosen-Metsch has made financial aid a top priority. During her tenure, the endowment has doubled, and the School has created three more international Dual Degree Programs along with two pioneering community college partnerships that offer full-ride scholarships for exceptional students.

The last quarter century at GS can best be described as progress made with deep intention and commitment, intermixed with moments of opportunity, where the leadership at the School, over two transformative deanships, saw opportunity and moved to embrace it, always driving the School forward. These commitments reflect GS’s larger achievement of turning possibility into practice, again and again, over the past 25 years.

Growing Enrollment

Investing in the School meant growing enrollment, and growing enrollment meant expanding access to an elite Ivy League education. For GS, this started with recruiting the very best students from the nation’s community colleges—often the first point of entry for nontraditional students. The “deep and robust” admission plan, said Rodgers, led GS to look for the first time outside the tri-state area and to an aggressive recruitment effort to identify the top students at leading community colleges across the country. At the same time, the admissions office reached out to groups of students that did not enter through college—Wall Street traders, performing artists, professional athletes—by promoting student stories that mirrored the prospective applicants’ own trajectories.

Intensive outreach bore fruit. Enrollment nearly doubled by 2025, now with 2,983 students (as compared to 1,593 in 2000- 2001), with 60 percent coming from community colleges. As the School’s reputation grew, the varied pathways students took to get here were nearly as likely to originate in another country as the U.S.; a full 29 percent of GS students are now international, up from 2 percent in 2000. International enrollment was further boosted by the School’s formation of four undergraduate Dual Degree Programs located across the globe, with a total of 603 students enrolled in these programs in 2025.

Growth has gone hand in hand with a more vigilant approach to admissions, one focused on selecting exceptional students who will persist through the realities of balancing Columbia coursework with work, family, or other responsibilities. That attention to fit and readiness, along with the increased number of students coming to GS from greater distances, has helped flip the part-time/full- time ratio from roughly 60/40 to 40/60 and led to higher matriculation rates.

Helping Student Veterans Thrive

As GS was planning for investment and growth, and in the wake of 9/11, Awn and Rodgers, then admissions dean, knew that veterans—a student population that was central to the origins of the School following World War II—would be returning to higher education, this time from Afghanistan and Iraq. True to form, they didn’t wait for them to enroll; instead, they did something innovative for an Ivy: Rodgers and the admissions team began recruiting veterans to Columbia, visiting military bases around the country and building new connections with specific military units, particularly in the special operations community. Importantly, the School went all in on the Yellow Ribbon Program, putting millions of dollars into institutional grants that were matched by the Department of Veterans Affairs to offer free tuition and fees. “We didn’t do this because we thought it would be fun,” said Rodgers. “We did it because there’s a historic connection in the School and because it makes us a better institution having a veteran voice in the classroom. This is a school that takes lived experience seriously. That’s our role.” And the vets came marching in, with their numbers increasing from only 26 veterans in 2000 to over 300 today. Some of those initial post 9/11 vets formed MilVets, a student organization geared toward providing networking opportunities, resources, and support to help veterans succeed; it is now the largest student veteran organization in the Ivy League.

Paul Yates ’05, ’08BUS, a founding member of MilVets, recognized early on the importance of fostering connections among Columbia’s veteran community. Today, Yates continues to do so as cofounder and president of Columbia Veterans, a nonprofit alumni organization, and as a member of the GS Board of Visitors. “What began as a small and challenging effort to support Columbia’s student veterans evolved into a vital exchange of perspectives with veterans and younger students learning side by side, enriching classroom dialogue, sharpening critical thinking, and building lifelong bonds that continue to shape the University and our communities,” Yates said.

With decades of serving student veterans, GS had a deep bank of expertise to share with others. In 2017, Awn and Rodgers partnered one last time to create the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration (CVTI). CVTI was designed, said Dave Keefe, its director of community engagement, to “expand and scale the services that GS had built, to provide this model that we refer to as ‘to, through, and beyond,’” supporting prospective students, current students, and alumni. Starting with a single online course, CVTI has since grown into a national presence that “trains the trainers,” partnering with schools, veteran service organizations, and companies nationwide. Keefe says CVTI has reached “an inflection point in building this integrational culture of support for veterans.”

Reimagining Global Education

Intentional growth and investment met opportunity at GS when the prestigious French university Sciences Po approached Columbia about an undergraduate partnership in 2007—coincidentally just when then-President Lee Bollinger was urging Columbia’s leaders to think more expansively about what it meant to be an international university. GS’s leadership determined that simply enrolling international students or offering limited study abroad opportunities was not enough to prepare students to study and work anywhere in the world. Awn seized the opportunity to partner with Sciences Po in a model that immersed students in two academic cultures.

Inaugurated in 2010, the Dual BA Program with Sciences Po became the template for subsequent partnerships with City University of Hong Kong, launched in 2012 and expanded in 2025 to four-year admissions; Trinity College Dublin, launched in 2018; and Tel Aviv University, launched in 2020. All these programs have drawn a different kind of nontraditional student to GS, subtly shifting the way GS defines nontraditional, focusing on educational path just as much as lived experience. While they have a traditional demographic, Rodgers said, “These students will not be satisfied with a traditional four-year experience on one campus. They have often lived in multiple countries and speak many languages; they are students of the world.”

As Anton Bengt Frederikkson ’15, a graduate of the Columbia-Sciences Po inaugural class, observed, “The Dual Degree programs continue to draw an even broader array of curious, highly driven students across the U.S. and the globe who may be in search of a differentiated educational path for their sense of adventure or self- discovery to unfold.”

Forging Local Partnerships

The lessons learned in international partnership became an important foundation as GS realized there was work to do with domestic schools, and even more specifically, work to do in New York City. Building on years of success recruiting community-college students, GS has launched two partnerships with New York City institutions that create direct routes to a Columbia degree. Inaugurated in 2023, the NextGen Public Health Scholars Program with Hostos Community College in the South Bronx identifies standout students early, supports them through their associate degrees, and brings them to GS for their bachelor’s work, with a built-in progression to the Mailman School of Public Health. The BMCC–Columbia NYC Scholars Program, begun in Fall 2024, similarly offers high- achieving Borough of Manhattan Community College students a full-ride scholarship and a seamless transition into GS to complete their Columbia degrees.

Building Community

It was not enough to welcome ever more exceptional and diverse students to GS; Awn and the members of the GS Student Council (GSSC) focused on creating programming and support systems that addressed students’ distinct needs while also opening doors to the Columbia- wide clubs and activities. From hosting a smattering of events in the 1990s and early aughts—orientation, student-faculty dinners, leadership awards, and graduation—Student Life now hosts over 180 programs a year (exclusive of orientation). These range from identity-based community spaces, such as groups for LGBTQ+ students and student parents, to dedicated and comprehensive support for First Generation Low Income (FLI) students, which represent 40 percent of the student body, and peer-to-peer mentoring and leadership development sessions. Complementing these community spaces is a parallel expansion of academic support, including an increase in the number of advisors. The Academic Resource Center, helmed by Dean Sara Remedios, has grown well beyond its original science and math mandate to offer a range of tutoring, mentoring, and skills workshops in a dedicated campus hub.

Engaging Alumni

The final piece of the 10-year plan focused on expanding alumni relations and development. Senior Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Relations Jill Galas Hickey describes it as a deliberate hand-off from Awn to Rosen-Metsch that positioned GS to engage alumni more meaningfully and strengthen fundraising. That expansion reflects the instinct that has shaped GS for decades: a willingness to keep saying “yes” to students long after they graduate. GS now counts 24,000 living alumni, with an active core of about 2,500. When Galas Hickey arrived in 2017, the development office had just two full-time staff members; today it has eight, demonstrating the School’s growing investment in alumni engagement. “Everyone has a student-facing part of the job,” Galas Hickey said. “We want to ensure a positive student experience, because that makes you want to be an active alum.”

GS students are often included in alumni programming, and mentorship has become a regular feature of student life. Leadership groups embody that same philosophy. The alumni association remains an active volunteer body, while the Board of Visitors has grown from 13 largely advisory members to 26 engaged supporters focused on long–range planning and scholarships. What Galas Hickey values most is that the board “reflects our students. We want a student to stumble across the Board of Visitors and see themselves.” Entrepreneurs, performers, veterans, and first- generation graduates all serve, mirroring the nontraditional paths GS champions.

One Board of Visitors member who has witnessed—and contributed to—GS’s
growth is Kikka Hanazawa ’00, a social entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, and member of the University’s Board of Trustees. “Columbia’s investment in me as a GS student changed my life,” Hanazawa recalled. “It has been so gratifying over the past 25 years to see GS continue to create possibilities for more and more students. I am excited to do what I can to ensure that future generations can have the same transformative experience that I had.”

Investing in the Future

This investment in GS alumni and in fundraising for GS students has had measurable results. Prior to 2018, GS had raised five gifts of $1 million or more. Since 2018, Columbia GS has raised 22 gifts of $1 million or more, totaling more than $50 million in new commitments raised almost entirely in support of GS financial aid. These successes have had a tremendous impact on the School’s ability to provide financial aid to more students. Fundraising has tripled since 2018; the endowment has doubled during Rosen-Metsch’s tenure; and in 2024, the University committed a historic $30 million investment to support scholarships, housing, and long-term growth.

Looking Ahead

Over the past five years, GS has faced serious tests, from the pandemic to constraints driven by shifting government support. Yet the story of the last quarter century, the first of the new millennium, is, at its core, a story of momentum. It is a story of a school built to adapt, to innovate, and to widen access without compromising excellence. Today, GS has every reason to be confident about what comes next.

In the years ahead, the School that has opened so many figurative doors for students will soon open new ones—in a literal sense. Rosen-Metsch’s push to grow the endowment, together with Columbia’s historic $30 million investment, has laid the foundation for one of the School’s most critical priorities: dedicated residential housing for GS students for the first time in the School’s history. Columbia’s purchase of a building in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, just blocks from Lewisohn Hall, will create a home for more than 300 students. Renovated with GS students’ specific needs in mind and designed to support belonging and well-being, the building will include on-site resources such as a market co-located with a common kitchen to provide affordable meal choices and spaces for community-building gatherings and events.

At the same time, GS is preparing to build on what it has proven it can do—expanding the NYC Scholars Program to additional New York City community colleges, exploring a parallel partnership with Miami Dade College, and extending its global reach through a new Dual Degree Program in Singapore. Taken together, the commitments reflect a school still guided by the instinct that has defined its rise: recognizing potential—and acting decisively to meet it.

The last 25 years have shown what GS becomes when it says “yes” with intention. The next 25 years will be about translating that same ethos into even greater opportunity, deeper community, and wider impact as GS students take an even more central place in the undergraduate program at Columbia.