Graduation and Certification

City College awards degrees each year on February 1, June 1, and September 1. You must apply for graduation in order to graduate. The College has one public graduation ceremony on June 1 each year. Those who earned their degrees on the preceding September 1 or February 1 are recognized in the June ceremony.

1. How do I apply for graduation?

The deadline to apply for graduation is about three months before the graduation date, so do not delay filing your application. Do it early in the semester you are graduating. After you have filed, notify the Head of your program so a graduation check can begin. Copies of all teaching licenses, approvals for course waivers, and transcripts from your previous colleges should be in your file in the program office. Check to be sure they are there so that your graduation check will go smoothly. If you had undergraduate liberal arts requirements to make up, be sure you have submitted evidence of how you met the outstanding requirement.

The college requires that you be enrolled in courses the semester prior to graduation.  If you are not, a maintenance of matriculation fee will be charged.  Please consult the College Bulletin for information about this fee.  

2. How do I apply for certification?

There are two steps to the application for certification:
1) Please fill out a certification request form, available in the Graduate Early Childhood Education Office (North Academic Center, Room 5/211). Submitting this form to our office will trigger a review of your records to ensure that you have completed the required coursework, liberal arts pre-requisites, and New York State teacher examinations. Deadlines for filing this application are the same as those for the applications for graduation:

November 1 for February certification

March 1 for June certification

July 1 for September certification

When the semester is complete, if your records are in order, you will be recommended for certification by the program, then the Department, then the School of Education's Certification Officer.

2) There is an additional on-line application process that you must begin. For a complete description of this process and links to the appropriate parts of the New York State Education Department web site, see the web pages of the School of Education Certification Office.

Once you have put yourself into the online system and have been approved by all School of Education parties, the Certification Officer puts through your recommendation, which takes only a few days or weeks to process.

3. What can I do to prove I have completed my program while I am waiting for my certificate to arrive from SED?

Once your application for certification is submitted to the office of Graduate Admissions, you may request from the Registrar a "letter of completion." Give a copy of this letter to the Graduate Admissions Office. This office will then give you a letter stating that your application will be mailed to the New York State as soon as the final transcript is received from the Registrar.