Yeah, it may not be as good as what Europe has been doing successfully for years, but it's a great step in the right direction:
New York will be the only state in the country to offer universal public college tuition coverage for working- and middle-class residents after the program was included in the budget package approved Sunday night.
The state's Excelsior Scholarship program will be rolled out in tiers over the next three years, starting with full coverage of four-year college tuition this fall for students whose families make less than $100,000.
So is there a catch? Yes, a few:
After they graduate, students who received the scholarship must live and work in New York for the same number of years they received funding. If they leave the state, their scholarship will be converted into a loan.
The scholarship covers the cost of tuition, which is currently $6,470 annually at four-year schools and about $4,350 a year at community colleges. But students will still be on the hook for fees and other expenses. At a SUNY school, fees cost $1,590 annually and room and board for those living on campus was $12,590 this year. Books could run you another $1,000.
Room and board are huge expenses, especially at public colleges in New York. And although forcing students to stay and work in the state might seem fair on the surface, it is pretty futile, as Slate points out:
Tethering graduates to New York for four or five years is pointless—keeping young people around is not even close to the Empire State's most pressing issue (see: Brooklyn). Philosophically it's also off-key. New York's public colleges overwhelmingly cater to in-state students, whose parents pay plenty of taxes to Albany. It is unclear why those students should owe anything more for the privilege of an affordable education, especially if, as Cuomo said in his statement, “Today, college is what high school was.” And finally, it just makes things complicated. Which again, undermines the concept behind making college free—it's supposed to make the process of obtaining an education less intimidating and bewildering for students without much in the way of guidance or support.
This is also a “last dollar” program, meaning that it only kicks in after subtracting the value of other grants and scholarships. The problem with this approach is that lower income students won’t be able to use their other scholarship and grant money to cover living expenses--which kinda should have been the point of this whole thing to begin with.
Most European countries already offer free tuition the right way, but no one does it better than Germany. They invest in their people, and it has paid off “big-ly". Their high-wage, unionized economy is running circles around us. (Oh, and just so you know, their universities teach in English and are open to Americans. Just sayin')
Nonetheless, I have to give New York a lot of credit for this. They can now legitimately say that they are the only state that offers free four-year tuition, and it will be a help to many students who otherwise might not have been able to go to college because they had the misfortune of being born into non-wealthy families.
As I’ve pointed out before, making college tuition-free has enormous benefits. We would have an entire nation made up of a skilled and educated workforce. Billions that would have gone for monthly debt payments would instead flood the economy as disposable income. And here’s the kicker: we could provide it to every adult in the US for the next 23 years by simply cutting just this one freaking Pentagon boondoggle.
No other nation on earth saddles it’s citizens with so much crushing debt for education as the US. Sure, this new way would mean fewer private gold courses for education loan shark CEOs, but it would also mean a stronger and better nation for the rest of us.
Yes, New York’s program may be fall a bit short, but it’s a good step forward for our core progressive value that government should actually invest in its people for the taxes that we already contribute. That’s a far cry from where we are here in GOP-dominated Florida, where my taxes instead go to pay rich, greedy corporations while our schools are slashed to the bone. Hats off to you, NY.