Law

Faced with a national drop in law school applications and a tough job market for law graduates, Fordham Law School created new clusters of electives to give students more focused expertise. Also approved was a required course in the quantitative skills increasingly valued by employers. The school expanded degree options as well, with faculty approving new programs including master’s degrees in fashion law and corporate compliance.

The law school continues to do well in placing graduates, as shown by its No. 15 rank in National Law Journal for first-year associate hiring by large firms.

Graduate Arts & Sciences

Responding to national enrollment trends in 2013-2014, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) worked to develop distinctive programs including master’s degrees in public media, data analytics, and clinical research methodology. The school also stepped up marketing and recruitment for its master’s programs in applied psychological methods, conservation biology, elections and campaign management, ethics and society, and urban studies. In addition, GSAS began planning for workshops and internships in speaking and writing about science after pilot programs showed high student interest.

While applications to master’s programs dropped 30 percent, the size of the entering master’s cohort only dropped 5 percent, in part because of the high quality of applications.

Education

The Graduate School of Education saw an overall decline in enrollment in 2013-2014, although it ticked up 2 percent in educational leadership programs. Among program improvements, the education doctorate will get new “teacher leader” and higher education strands under a redesign that will align the program with the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate.

The school generated $7.4 million in grants or contracts for conducting various teacher education programs, supporting New York City schools, and other initiatives.

Social Service

The Graduate School of Social Service saw growth in its traditional Master of Social Work program and continues to have the nation’s highest number of students in such a program. The school completed a four-year redesign of its undergraduate and graduate social work degrees, which are now anchored in human rights and social justice, and implemented interdisciplinary programs including a master’s in nonprofit leadership and a joint master’s in social work and public health.

In other efforts, the school piloted a summer workshop in human rights for social work graduate students in partnership with the Human Rights Consortium at the University of London.

Business

The Graduate School of Business Administration expanded its roster of specialized master’s programs—now numbering 16—while also reinvesting in the MBA program and developing a pilot doctoral program in business.

In summer 2014, reorganization began to bring the undergraduate and graduate schools under one roof and improve students’ end-to-end services, from admission through post-graduation. One key focus for graduate business education at Fordham is to restore the prominence of the part-time MBA program and, most crucially, enhance personal and professional development services for students.

Religion

The Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, striving to reach underserved areas, won state approval for six distance education programs: a Doctor of Ministry, master’s programs in Christian spirituality and pastoral studies, a revised certificate in spiritual direction, and certificates in Hispanic ministry and Christian spirituality.

GRE also created workshops to help lay ministers reach certification, and is developing—among other things—a master’s in digital ministry jointly with GSAS and, with WFUV-FM (90.7), a music and spirituality course that will initially be offered free as a way of promoting the University.

Read or download the complete report here.

His mother, Margo Stroie, a full-time accountant, thought Fordham would be the perfect fit for Daniel, who is now in his second year at the Gabelli School of Business. Daniel, however, remained uncertain despite his mother’s persistence. He had applied to many colleges and received several acceptance letters, but found that none of the schools jumped out at him. He narrowed his choices down to New York University and Fordham, to which he had been accepted through Fordham’s early action program.

“My parents actually scheduled school visits and attended the open houses at Fordham without me,” he said. “I didn’t want to go simply because my mother wanted me to go.”

But his curiosity led him to revisit the Rose Hill campus just before the decision deadline. He was reluctant to admit it, but he soon realized his mother’s instincts were right.

“After exploring the campus and speaking to current students, I finally decided this was the school for me,” Daniel said. Although he had originally applied for the liberal arts college at Rose Hill, he transferred to the Gabelli School of Business.

His mother, of course, was elated, and to this day “continues to remind him that she was right.”

Margo’s enthusiasm for Fordham also inspired her husband to start thinking about graduate school. Having immigrated to the United States from Romania, Adrian Stroie, a principal at a New York real estate development company, had always wanted to study law.

“It is difficult to attend law school in Romania, as there are few schools,” said Adrian. “Competition is tough, and you have to prepare for many years in advance.”

Adrian found it inspiring to help his son search among schools and apply to them. “I thought maybe I should give it a try as well,” he said.

Soon Daniel and his father were applying to schools at the same time and preparing for their respective standardized tests—Daniel for the SAT, his father for the LSAT.

“While I was working on my college essays, my dad was too. It was great to have someone else in the house going through the same daunting application process,” Daniel said.

Adrian was swayed to apply at Fordham because of Margo’s enthusiasm for the University. In fact, so was she—once Adrian had been accepted at Fordham Law, Margo herself applied to Fordham’s Graduate School of Business.

She dropped the news during a family vacation to Poland, where her family is from. Daniel was flabbergasted: “The first thing I did was shake my head,” he said, noting that he reacted as “typical teenager.”

“But then I came around,” he said. “Now I like the fact that we are a Fordham family.”

It certainly eased the transition to college, he said—“It’s difficult to feel homesick with family so close by.”

“Whenever we are all at home, I’m not the only one who gets to ask how classes are going,” he said.

As for Margo, she studies accounting and attends classes a few nights per week–and, revealed Daniel, is doing very well. She says she follows after her mother, who is still taking classes herself at age 65.

“It must run in the family,” she said.

— Angie Chen, FCRH ’12

Alex Niles, GBA ’11, sipped a green smoothie in his neighborhood West Village cafe, happy to talk about his new normal. The young entrepreneur has a lot on his plate these days: He’s running an apparel business, writing a column for the Huffington Post, and keeping medical appointments.

It’s a very different schedule than he was maintaining just over a year ago. In 2013, Niles was “living life as any 30-year-old would”—working, traveling, and staying out late with friends. A former Division 1 college soccer player, he was a healthy, active guy. But that summer, Niles began having stomach pains. And by September of that year, he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 gastric cancer.

“You have your foundation, your routine, but then something happens and you have to hit pause,” he said.

In October he shaved his head in preparation for his 21st cycle of chemotherapy. Now he’s doing so well that his medical team said he could take an indefinite break from treatments.

“All the doctors told me I wouldn’t be here, but I’m here,” he said. “They call me Superman where I get treated.” He’s adopted a plant-based diet and a “we-got-this” attitude. Still, he stresses that there is no cure for his disease.

Living with cancer has thrown Niles into a new routine—not only as a patient but as the founder and CEO of CureWear, an apparel brand for cancer patients and their supporters.

He developed the idea for the business during his lengthy chemotherapy treatments. Each time, he’d have to remove his shirt so caregivers could access the medical port implanted in his chest to deliver the chemo drugs.

“I just didn’t want to do that. It was very belittling,” he said, and especially tough on women and little kids. He could have worn a button-down shirt, he admits. “But I was cold. It was the coldest winter ever. And I wanted to wear what I wanted to wear.

“So what I did was I literally cut a hole in my shirt and safety pinned it afterward. And I said, hold on a second. Here’s a very simple concept that actually has a very big impact on a tough situation.”

And with that, the idea for CureWear’s patient shirt was hatched. The black T-shirt features a port-accessibility patch that opens and closes with Velcro.

“It makes me feel more comfortable. My parents, my family, and friends who are there, they see me a little more comfortable. It’s even a little less awkward for the nurses,” Niles said. “When I first brought in samples to my oncology team, everyone cried, they were so happy.”

After his first rounds of treatment were successful, Niles spent the spring sourcing fabrics and working out other production details for CureWear. In August, he launched a Kickstarter campaign with a video he produced with friends on a West Village rooftop. The campaign raised $50,000, exceeding his goal by $20,000. With the contributions came several shirt orders. He has just started making his first deliveries.

Niles said he’s always had the entrepreneurial “itch,” but he sharpened his business skills at Fordham.

“[My professors] allowed me to realize my strengths as well as what I had to work harder on,” he said. “And I walked out with some really good friends.”

David Soberman, GBA ’11, who appears in the Kickstarter video, is one of Niles’ former Fordham MBA classmates. The two speak almost daily.

“I think the Kickstarter way allowed him to ease into the process,” he said. “It allowed him to take advantage of his social networks,” which Soberman said are vast. They include many loyal friends from Fordham; from Drexel University, where Niles was a scholarship soccer player; and from other walks of life.

Soberman said that throughout his treatment, Niles was always concerned about how his friends and family were handing the news of his illness and how much they were doing to support him.

To that end, CureWear also makes shirts for supporters—short-sleeve, high-quality black athletic tees with pink, blue, or green trim. They offer supporters a way to help: Niles reinvests 10 percent of the company’s proceeds in making shirts for patients, some of which he plans to give away to hospitals and other cancer organizations.

When he’s not busy running his business, Niles brings his sunny outlook to his online followers. In addition to his own blog, Smiles for Niles, he’s got a regular column with the Huffington Post and has been published in The New York Times and Psychology Today. In his Times piece, “An Athlete Tackles Cancer,” he wrote about mentally preparing for chemo treatments: “I picture myself crossing that line, snapping the ribbon of victory, and celebrating with exuberance.”

Niles said the cancer is always on his mind. “It’s a very heavy backpack to wear.”

Writing was a way to heal at first. “But it very quickly turned into what I realized was a source of strength for people. People started reaching out to me and saying thank you.” And he said the same about CureWear. “It’s been an incredibly positive distraction for me. And we’re really making an impact.

“The biggest lesson for me is that time is the most valuable commodity, and I have all intentions to make the most of mine.”

He started hiring Fordham students because he wanted to give back to his alma mater.

“I remember how tough it was for me to crack into the investment business,” Getsos says. “I decided this would be something I can give back to the school in my way.”

A son of Greek immigrants and a first-generation college student, Getsos earned a B.S. in finance and economics from Fordham in 1985, and an M.B.A. from the University in 1987. Today he’s a member of the Fordham parents community; his daughter Julia is a Fordham junior, while his son Peter is a freshman at the University.

Getsos started the internship program while working as the chief investment officer at Lepercq, de Neuflize & Co., and he continues it in his role as director of research and senior vice president at Klingenstein, Fields & Co., where he has worked since 2006.

He says because he has worked for small to mid-sized firms, he has had the opportunity to teach interns about all aspects of the investment business.

“When an analyst is working on something, the intern works right alongside him or her. Interns sit with us when we’re interviewing CEOs and CFOs,” he says. “They’re actually doing models for me, where other students may just be doing models in a classroom.”

Getsos is clear with interns that although there will not be a job at his firm for them after graduation, his primary goal is to give them the experience they need to build a rewarding career on Wall Street.

Michael Manzo, GSB ’00, interned for Getsos for two years as a Fordham undergraduate. After graduation, JP Morgan hired him as an equity research analyst, an opportunity for which he credits Getsos.

“I was the first equity research analyst from Fordham that JP Morgan had hired right out of school, and that was entirely due to Jerry and the experience I gained working with him,” Manzo says.

“The people I was hired with went to Georgetown, Brown, Wharton, and other ‘bigger’ schools. But nobody had the internship that I’d had, with that true asset management experience.”

While the work experience is immensely valuable, Getsos’ interns say that it is their boss himself who truly sets the internship apart.

Michael Watts, a Gabelli School senior who interned for Getsos in the summer of 2013, was struck not only by Getsos’ knowledge and natural ability to share his expertise but also by his character.

“Jerry’s an incredible teacher, extremely patient with college kids who are just striving to get their footing in the field,” Watts says. “He’s full of energy and passion for what he does. You want to work hard for Jerry.”

Getsos has lunch with his interns nearly every day, serving as a mentor not only on career opportunities and investment strategies but also on life and family.

“I’d love to be as good an investor as Jerry, but I’d be happy to be as good a person as he is,” Watts says. “Jerry is the quintessential Fordham man.”

Getsos does not seek interns with previous investment experience. He’s looking to find students who are hungry to learn about the field.

“They are raw in the beginning, but as typical Fordham students, they’re hard working, they show up, and they have a strong ability to learn,” he says.

Getsos’ commitment to opening doors to the investment business for Fordham students has inspired others to do the same.

Manzo currently works as an adjunct professor at Fordham. He says he has made it a priority to connect with students the way Getsos connected with him, making time to talk with students before or after class and offer advice on job opportunities.

“I have been directly or indirectly responsible for getting people jobs, and that’s something I am proud of,” Manzo says.

It’s that type of investment in the future of Fordham students that Getsos says inspires him to continue pouring time and energy into teaching his interns the ropes.

“There’s a rewarding feeling I get, when they’re still interning with me and about to graduate, and get that job at JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs,” he says. “That’s why I do it.”

Donna M. Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business and dean of the business faculty, will assume the role of interim dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration effective July 1, the Office of the Provost announced in May.

The appointment precedes the yearlong process of unification of the two business schools that Dean Rapaccioli will oversee beginning in September.

Rapaccioli said she’s excited at the prospect of working with the faculty of the business schools to implement newly approved master’s in business administration and doctoral curriculums. Bringing together the alumni of both schools is also very exciting.

The hallmarks of the school will be applied learning, global perspectives, and business with purpose.

“It allows us to fulfill our responsibility to educate the next generation of business educators, and to do it in a way that’s cutting edge and really meets the needs of the next generation of learners,” she said.

She joined the Fordham faculty in 1987 and was appointed dean of the Gabelli School of Business in 2007. In 2010, she expanded her responsibilities to also serve as the dean of the business faculty.

“In her decanal roles, Dr. Rapaccioli’s proactive leadership is grounded in a strategic vision that recognizes the great promise of business education at Fordham as a world-class center of excellence in research and teaching in the heart of New York City,” said Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., provost of the University.

David A. Gautschi, Ph.D., who is stepping down as dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration, is taking a one-year sabbatical, after which he will return to the University with the title of dean emeritus and will hold the Joseph Keating, S.J., Chair as a tenured professor.

“A talented administrator and business scholar, Dean Rapaccioli has proven herself as dean of business faculty since 2009 and dean of the undergraduate school since 2007,” said Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., provost of the University. “We expect great things for this unification headed by Dean Rapaccioli. The integrated core curriculum she designed for the Gabelli School, a blend of hands-on applied learning in business and a deep grounding in the humanities, has received national attention.”

The unification has been approved by the business faculty, Faculty Senate, and the Fordham University Board of Trustees. The reorganized school of business will emphasize innovation in faculty research and teaching, as well as student outcomes. Academic planning for the unification included a comprehensive revision of the M.B.A. curriculum for the first time in decades, and the creation of a Ph.D. program that will help to attract world-class faculty and promising future scholars. The The unification will also allow greater academic collaboration and alumni interaction among business and other Fordham schools, adding greater depth to teaching and research.

David A. Gautschi, Ph.D., will leave his role as dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration on July 1, 2014. He will continue his service to the University as Dean Emeritus and will be assigned to the Joseph Keating, S.J., Chair as a tenured professor beginning in the 2014-2015 academic year, following a one-year sabbatical.

Freedman thanked Gautschi “for laying a firm foundation for graduate business education’s continued success at Fordham.”

During the reorganization, Fordham will continue to work with a representative body of the business school community, including alumni volunteers and donors, to help generate the resources needed to elevate the school’s profile. This effort is being led by Mario J. Gabelli, GSB ’65, who in 2010 gave his name and $25 million to the undergraduate business college—the largest gift in Fordham’s history. Recently Gabelli funded the initiation of the doctoral-level business program as well. which will be known as the Gabelli Ph.D. Program at the Fordham Gabelli School of Business.

Over the next three years, business education will become much more visible at the Lincoln Center campus. The current Law School building will become the new Manhattan-based home of the business school, housing both the graduate business school and the new undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Global Business program, which has accepted its first class of 50 students to start in August.

“We are very pleased to have this unification begin, and in Donna Rapaccioli we have a highly capable administrator to lead us through it,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “Having one school of business will be good for the students—graduate and undergraduate—and faculty, good for the University, and good for business education.”

The EMBA program has been ranked by The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report andCEO Magazine. It is intended for candidates with at least seven years of professional experience, and features a weekend course schedule and a curriculum that is global in scope.

“The FT is a premier global ranking for EMBA,” said Francis Petit, Ed.D., associate dean for executive programs at GBA. “We are happy to maintain and improve our position, as there’s a lot of variability in this ranking among other schools.”

Petit noted Fordham’s strong stand-alone showing: Many of the schools ranked were paired with other international institutions, with relatively few single-school programs making the grade.

Petit said a concerted effort was made by Program Associate Mary Kate Donato to champion faculty publications, as well as student’s return on investment. He noted that the cohort that was surveyed was the Class of 2010, which he called a “very spirited group.”

For more information on Fordham’s EMBA visit www.bnet.fordham.edu/academics/executive_mba/

On Sept. 23, David Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) took to the podium and introduced William Dudley, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A bank of TV cameras lined the back of the room as a dozen journalists tapped away on their laptops.

Although this was not a typical morning for Gautschi, neither was the Fed CEO’s visit an isolated incident: The star wattage of guest speakers at GBA has brightened considerably, including visits by Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, FCRH ’78, LAW ’81, and Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke, LAW ’71, who sat on a panel last March.

On Oct. 15, former New York City Department of Education chief Joel Klein sat down for a discussion with Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, as part of the Business in the City symposium that Gautschi launched last spring. Former Reagan budget director David Stockman discussed his recent book, The Great Deformation, at the Wall Street Council lecture on Oct. 22.

The high-profile visitors are just one part of a larger paradigm shift that Gautschi was looking to create when he came to Fordham in 2010 from the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y., where he served as dean and professor of marketing and business economics.

While GBA has been well served by a dean with an academic as well as practical understanding of marketing, marketing was not his first love—math was. In fact, Gautschi said he took a fortuitous, if somewhat unorthodox, route toward an understanding of marketing.

Born into an Air Force family, Gautschi said the place he most identified as home was the state of Maine, where he spent his high school years and met his wife. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, he pursued an M.B.A., though he still hedged his bets with math by focusing on quantitative methods, which eventually led to studying modeling and applied economics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate. Throughout, Gautschi never took a course on marketing. Yet, his first job after Berkeley was teaching marketing at Cornell.

Gautschi seems well aware of the irony inherent in learning by teaching. But it illustrates his underlying rationale that adaptability is key to both teaching business courses and running a business. He described his eventual shift from academia to business, and back again, as analogous to the balance struck by business schools—maintaining one foot in the academy and another in the private sector.

Gautschi’s career took root in France, where he developed three successful businesses while teaching at INSEAD. For one business he used computer modeling to develop a decision-support system for clients—pre-Excel tools intended to help them with pricing, forecasting, and advertising. He offered clients a simulation intended to show them how the product performed in the real world, and the clients raved about the simulation, preferring it to the product Gautschi was actually trying to sell.

It was, he said, his first real lesson in business and marketing, and he responded accordingly: he made the simulation the product.

“The way the model worked was that it allowed people to see the whole picture of their business and to quasi-respond,” he said. “But models are inherently wrong because they’re abstractions of reality.”

Here Gautschi shifts from businessman to academic.

“The best leaders need to be good abstract thinkers because the business environment is constantly in flux,” he said.

It is for this reason that Gautschi says business school professors need to avoid being “too prescriptive.” He noted that many faculty in business schools haven’t been in business and can therefore provide students the objective perspective of someone who is not emotionally attached to the subject—a perspective they’ll need in the future.

“We have to remember that we’re preparing students to go out and participate in a future that we’re not participating in,” he said. “They’ll experience things we’ve never faced and they’ll have to figure it out.”

Gautschi believes there are two roles that a business school must play: the practical and the theoretical. He stressed that GBA is a graduate school, not simply a professional school.

“I don’t think that universities have ever come to grips with studying business as a part of the academy,” he said. “Yet you don’t go to an art historian to instruct someone how to paint.”

He said that running a business is different from studying the phenomenon of business. Preparing students “to go out there and do it puts business schools squarely in the realm of a professional school,” but a graduate school provides a broader education alongside practical application.

“Do we exist to churn out people to make a lot of money and get wealthy? Or is there something broader that’s aligned with the purpose of the university? The purpose of the university is to contribute constructive and productive citizens to society,” he said.

In addition to providing perspective through a broad-based curriculum, Gautschi has pursued an overhaul of the student body and faculty that mimics the globalization of the business world. At the moment 720 of GBA’s approximately 1,765 students come from abroad, representing 43 different countries.

The cohort of international students, and indeed GBA’s international faculty, gives American students a basis on which to understand globalization.

“After graduation they’ll be interacting with each other whether they want to or not,” he said. “It would be irresponsible as a business school not to reflect what’s going on in the business world.”

Video:
Dean Gautschi discussing going global at GBA

The EMBA program has been ranked by The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report andCEO Magazine. It is intended for candidates with at least seven years of professional experience, and features a weekend course schedule and a curriculum that is global in scope.

“The FT is a premier global ranking for EMBA,” said Francis Petit, Ed.D., associate dean for executive programs at GBA. “We are happy to maintain and improve our position, as there’s a lot of variability in this ranking among other schools.”

Petit noted Fordham’s strong stand-alone showing: Many of the schools ranked were paired with other international institutions, with relatively few single-school programs making the grade.

Petit said a concerted effort was made by Program Associate Mary Kate Donato to champion faculty publications, as well as student’s return on investment. He noted that the cohort that was surveyed was the Class of 2010, which he called a “very spirited group.”

For more information on Fordham’s EMBA visit www.bnet.fordham.edu/academics/executive_mba/

Fordham’s Graduate School of Business Administration’s Executive MBA program has been ranked #66 worldwide by the Financial Times. The move represents a jump up from last year’s #72 position.

The EMBA program has been ranked by The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report and CEO Magazine. The program is intended for candidates with at least seven years of professional experience, and features a weekend course schedule that is global in scope.

“The FT is a premier global rankings for EMBA,” said Francis Petit, Ed.D., associate dean for executive programs at GBA. “We are happy to maintain and improve our position, as there’s a lot of variability in this ranking among other schools.”

Petit noted Fordham’s strong stand-alone showing: Many of the schools ranked were partnered with other international institutions, with relatively few single-school programs making the grade.

Petit said a concerted effort was made by Program Associate Mary Kate Donato to champion faculty publications, as well as student’s return on investment. He noted that the cohort that was surveyed was the Class of 2010, which he called a “very spirited group.”

For more information on Fordham’s EMBA click here.
For the Financial Times rankings click here.

In remarks delivered to the Graduate School of Business Administration’s Fordham Wall Street Council on Sept. 23, William C. Dudley, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said that the economy is slowly healing, though it remains challenged by significant headwinds preventing “any meaningful pickup in the economy’s foreword momentum.”

Dudley said that payroll and income tax increases, as well as the Congress’ budget sequestration, continue to drag on the economy. While he remained hopeful that the situation should ease in 2014, he said that ongoing budget battles in Washington could change that.
“It verges on the edge of fantasy [that]there will be a bipartisan collective decision on what to do with the long-term fiscal path,” he said, clarifying that the views were his own and not those of the Fed.

He suggested that such a bipartisan agreement on a fiscal path would go a long way to setting up a financial roadmap the nation would not likely waiver from in the future. Governmental credibility would be reinforced, and Americans would feel less uncertain about spending and investing.

He listed several good economic indicators, including signs that American households are paying down their debt—with delinquency rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards in decline. He said that housing prices have strengthened and that homebuilding has picked up. Lastly, he noted that the private sector’s profit margins have been high, with cash flow strong and credit availability improving.

Nevertheless, he remained wary.

“Currently, improving economic fundamentals versus fiscal drag and somewhat tighter financial conditions are pulling the economy in opposite directions, roughly canceling each other out,” he said.

Dudley pointed to other concerns, including the “hollowing out of the middle” in the labor market. He said high-end and low-end jobs are doing fine, but the jobs in the middle remain vulnerable to technologies and automation.

“Go to a factory floor in the United States and see how many workers there are—it’s incredibly automated,” he said.  “That has consequences; it affects income distribution.”
Although the Federal Reserve cannot address the issue of income distribution, Dudley said it is “very disturbing” that it has skewed toward the high end over the last 20 years. He said the chance for upward mobility in the nation is “not at all as good as we think it is.”

He said that the full impact of the federal government cutbacks have yet to register completely. He cited university research as one area that will suffer under sequestration, as much of it is dependent on federal grants.

“This will eventually squeeze university budgets over time,” he said.

Dudley reiterated his support of a Sept. 18 decision by the Federal Open Market Committee to continue the Fed’s purchasing of long-term Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities “until the outlook for the labor market has improved substantially.”