After winding his way through a righteously indignant speech on the plight of the middle class and the unfairness of student loan debt, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared in January, “We’re going to start, this year, the Excelsior Scholarship, which says very simply, free tuition to a state 2-year school or a 4-year school. If you come from any family earning $125,000 or less, the state will provide free tuition.”
On stage beside him sat Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., who called the plan “revolutionary.”
When Cuomo signed the legislation in April, he was flanked by Hillary Clinton, another of the scholarship’s full-throated champions.
As it turns out, the plan is neither simple nor revolutionary.
Cuomo’s legislation, passed as part of the state’s budget, is an exclusive and inflexible ploy with little benefit to many of the struggling young people and families it purports to rescue.
An analysis in the New York Times found that more than 90 percent of students at state community colleges, and 60 percent of those at four-year colleges, would not qualify.
Cuomo’s policy does not apply to part-time students and covers only the balance missed by other tuition grant programs. In fact, it requires any student eligible for a state tuition assistance program or a federal Pell grant to apply for “each such award.”
Students are required, depending on their study program, to enroll in 15 credits a semester, maintain a respectable grade point average, and graduate within four years. If they do not live and work in the state after graduation for as many years as they accepted assistance, they will owe back the price of their education.
The general cost of “college” includes tuition and room and board. Cuomo’s plan covers only tuition, leaving students with thousands of dollars of additional costs.
The yearly cost of Cuomo’s program is estimated in one study to be $163 million, and in another at more than $200 million.
This does not even touch on the impact that this artificially “free” education will have on private colleges, that will be forced to compete in a rigged marketplace. That rigging reduces incentives for state schools to control costs, so taxpayers will pay more than more as time goes by.
People care more about what they have to pay for. Writing for the Washington Post, Northwestern researcher Chenny Ng explained:
Leading a Northwestern University research team with my colleague James Rosenbaum … I spent a year interviewing 80 people who completed two-year college degrees a decade ago. Many of these graduates had been low-performing students who prioritized partying and exerted little effort in high school. They consistently, sometimes fervently, told us that paying for college made them grow up and work hard. Paying tuition — even a relatively small or nominal amount — seemed to help unlock a new identity as a responsible student.
Dissatisfaction with Cuomo’s plan cuts across ideological and party lines, with liberals arguing that it does too little and conservatives countering that it does too much. It’s a seriously flawed scheme and should be scrapped.
