Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled his plan for tuition-free college in New York. Immediately, progressive media jumped all over it, declaring that New York had become the first state to make college tuition-free.
But, in fact, that wasn’t what happened at all. Cuomo says his plan is free tuition but it is merely a smokescreen for a $1,000 tuition hike that will impact all students not eligible for the “Excelsior” Program.
Despite what Cuomo’s press releases say, the eligibility for the program is incredibly limited. To qualify students must be enrolled full-time, maintain a certain GPA determined by their college and take five classes a semester. These are simple, not practical, requirements for many low-income and working class students who have to keep a job to simply survive. They will thus be forced to pay the additional $1,000 in tuition.
Undocumented students, who are a significant population of students at both State University of New York (SUNY) and City University of New York (CUNY), are completely excluded from the program and thus, are also forced to pay the additional tuition.
It gets even worse. The program requires that students must stay and work in New York for the same amount of years they benefited from the scholarship. If they fail to do so, their credit from the scholarship will automatically become student loans.
Plus, the government is only allocating $163 million for the program, which is not nearly enough for both SUNY and CUNY. None of this money will go towards fixing the major funding crisis at SUNY and CUNY or towards increasing pay for dramatically underpaid adjuncts (who make about $3,000 per course at CUNY).
However, because of the $1,000 tuition hike, the state will actually take in a net revenue increase of over $274 million a year. It is here where we see the true purpose of the “Excelsior” scholarship. Its purpose is not to make college free, but to cynically co-opt the free-tuition movement in order to make profit off low-income students who can’t afford to take five classes a semester.
But that’s not all. The entire program comes with a “while supplies last” caveat because of the very small amount the government is allocating. There has already been speculation that the entire program will turn into a lottery because of this issue.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The Campaign to Make CUNY Free Again is an independent initiative of CUNY students and faculty fighting to truly create tuition-free higher education in New York. We are specifically collecting 30,000 petition signatures by June to trigger a referendum to amend the NYC charter.
The amendment we are proposing doesn’t involve any fine print from corporate Democrats like Cuomo’s does. We are pushing for a tax on the top 1 percent of earners in NYC (people that make over $600,000 a year) to fund a tuition-free CUNY, increase funding in CUNY, implement pay-parity for adjuncts and provide stipends for low-income students.
Education is a human right and fighting for tuition-free universities is more important than ever. We cannot afford to fall for the empty promises of corporate Democrats.
