Governor Cuomo at LaGuardia Community
College where he presented his proposal on free tuition for qualifying families. Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised an exciting
possibility on Tuesday when he unveiled a proposal that would cover tuition at
public universities and colleges in New York State for families earning up to
$125,000 by 2019.
The plan, which
requires legislative approval, recognizes that middle-income families that
might not be eligible for student aid based on current measures of need are
grappling with student debt, too.
But public higher
education officials who favor the idea in principle are worried that the Cuomo
administration might be lowballing cost projections as a way of selling the
proposal and that public institutions that are already struggling to meet the
needs of their students might be further squeezed. The Legislature needs to
conduct a thorough analysis of the costs before it moves ahead with the tuition
program.
New York’s public universities are a relative bargain compared to those in many other states.
Full-time tuition at four-year State University of New York campuses stands at
$6,470 per year; the City University of New York charges about the same. The
state spends nearly $1 billion annually through its tuition assistance
program — which provides aid for families with
an adjusted gross income of just under $100,000 and whose top awards stand at
$5,165. Under the Cuomo plan, the state would supplement existing state and
federal aid. The administration says that 940,000 families would qualify for
the new program based on income, but many of those young people would not
attend college, would chose a private college or would attend school out of
state. That would leave about 200,000 eligible students benefiting from the
free tuition program by 2019, when the program would be fully enacted. The
program would begin this fall, with a $100,000 income limit.
The administration estimates the program
would cost $163 million in 2019, a figure state legislators and higher
education officials who have looked into this issue in the past believe to be
far too low. An analysis in 2015 by New York City’s Independent Budget Office
found that a slightly different free-tuition program for the city’s community
colleges alone could cost as much as $232 billion.
The state anticipates that the full-time
student enrollment might grow by 10 percent — but that might underestimate the
appeal of a free tuition offer.
The lure of free tuition could bring a
rush of applicants across the system, particularly to major state university
campuses at Buffalo and Stony Brook. And higher enrollment would mean a greater
need for classrooms, teachers and faculty advisers.
Some public university officials are
concerned the campuses might be forced to shoulder additional costs on their
own. This wariness stems partly from the governor’s recent behavior. In 2015,
for example, he vetoed a bill that would have required the state to pay for
increases in some operating expenses at public universities. And last year, he
tried unsuccessfully to strip nearly $500 million in state aid from the City University’s
budget.
The Legislature has a responsibility to make sure that the state funds all of
the costs associated with this proposal without hurting the university system.
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