Cuomo Proposes More SUNY Tuition Hikes

Five years of SUNY tuition hikes amounting to 30% higher tuition?

That's not enough for Governor Cuomo - more are coming and Cuomo's stealing the money to use for other things:

It’s understandable that listeners might have mistaken Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s enthusiastic pronouncement of a $6.9 billion commitment to the State University of New York and the City University of New York as an increase for SUNY and CUNY. It isn’t. It’s a cut, delivered with all the deceptive enthusiasm of the chocolate ration reduction in George Orwell’s 1984.

Equally disappointing is the governor’s promotion of another “rational tuition plan,” under which students and parents would keep paying more and more while the state pays less.

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This proposal comes as tuition at schools like the University at Albany rose almost 5 percent this year. That’s on top of four prior years of tuition hikes under the “rational tuition plan,” an idea that sounded like a boon for higher education but has come to feel like a bait-and-switch game.

As we’ve pointed out before, the 2011 rational tuition program – under which tuition would increase $300 a year for five years – has increasingly shifted public higher education costs from the state to SUNY students. With state support staying relatively level as tuition steadily rose, the state’s share of SUNY costs has plunged from 59 percent prior to the Great Recession to 36 percent. Students’ now pay nearly two thirds. And, as we’ve noted in the past, it appears that $400 million of the extra tuition money – half of the $800 million more than students are paying – ended up in the state’s coffers.

That’s nothing but a tax hike, targeted just at SUNY students.

Everybody at that speech yesterday should have gotten up and screamed at Cuomo the way Charles Barron did.

Of course, it could be worse for SUNY.

Cuomo cut nearly $250 million from CUNY.