Patterico's Pontifications

8/28/2018

Quelle Surprise! Cuomo’s “Free College” Initiative Underwhelms

Filed under: General — JVW @ 1:22 pm



[guest post by JVW]

I apologize for the gratuitous French in the post title.

What if I told you that New York’s Excelsior Scholarship program, which Governor Andrew Cuomo promised would make in-state tuition “free” for middle-class residents, hasn’t ended up impacting all that many Empire State families? The program was first proposed in the spring of 2016 and launched amid much fanfare in January 2017, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election and the Democrat Party’s struggle to define a set of principles going forward. Senator Bernard Sanders joined the corrupt governor on stage to give his socialist blessing to the program, with the elderly Vermonter insisting that “we must make public colleges and universities tuition free for the middle-class and working families of our country.” The state’s 2018 budget was passed three months later, and the Excelsior Scholarship program was rolled out in time for the 2017-18 academic year.

So a bunch of New Yorkers from middle-class families ended up getting free tuition at the State University of New York and City University of New York campuses, right? Well, not exactly. A report by the Center for an Urban Future suggests that only about 3.2 percent of the more than 633,000 students enrolled in public colleges in the state are Excelsior Scholarship recipients. The numbers are even worse for the NYC public colleges, with CUNY university students and CUNY community college students reporting only 2.1 percent and 0.9 percent of students as scholarship recipients respectively. What’s more incredible is that better than two in three scholarship applicants were denied, a proportion way out of whack with the promises that Cuomo made to his middle class constituents.

The program’s eligibility is limited to families who make no more than $110,000 per year (bumped up to $125k next year), so there are plenty of New Yorkers who believe themselves to be middle class but are finding out that their kids don’t qualify because the family’s income is too high. In addition, students seeking an Excelsior Scholarship must first apply for all forms of federal financial aid, and many of the poorest New Yorkers are receiving full tuition aid from Uncle Sucker in Washington and thus do not need the additional help from Albany. Accepting the scholarship also obligates the student to spend one year working in New York after graduation for every scholarship year they received money, so given the difficult economic conditions in parts of New York state perhaps some potential recipients and their families have decided the scholarship isn’t such a good bet after all.

The biggest factor though that is limiting the scholarship’s reach is the requirement that recipients take at least 30 hours of course credit each year, which is pretty much a very manageable four courses per term, not even including summer sessions. Apparently New York college kids don’t care too much for being a full-time student, even when the government is picking up tuition costs. The Center for an Urban Future determined that a whopping 83 percent of the application rejections were students who were not keeping on graduation pace. With the traditional four-year bachelor’s degree now being stretched out for six years and the two-year associate’s degree taking three, the idea of matriculating your way through college before you turn 24 seems to be quaint and archaic.

And it just wouldn’t be a progressive crowning achievement were the program not confusingly administered and mostly opaque. Financial aid officers complain that the program lacks clear guidelines and buries both the student and the institution in tedious paperwork. While both SUNY and CUNY saw modest budget increases of 1.6% and 1.0% respectively in the 2018-19 state budget, the state plans to spend $1.15 billion managing student loans, a 23% increase over last year and a full tenth of what is spent on the two state college systems. And there is still no clear and definitive action plan for enforcing the post-college residency requirement, let alone defending it from the inevitable legal challenges.

It’s not too difficult to conclude that the Excelsior Scholarships were little more than progressive grandstanding, a way to pretend to make college “free” by creating jobs for bureaucrats without asking the higher education industry to undertake any meaningful reforms. Bringing along Crusty Old Bernie to provide an aura of real Marxist purity to the program is cynicism typical of Andrew Cuomo, an odious yet ambitious politician known primarily for his insincerity and nastiness. A real plan to either keep college costs low or to have them completely absorbed by the state would include genuine reforms such as requiring professors to teach more classes, closing departments and programs that don’t serve a great number of students, and paring the course catalog of esoteric courses that fit in with academia’s increasingly bizarre fetishes in order to concentrate on larger courses that have more general usefulness to the degree. With American higher education serving as the indoctrination camp for Democrat progressivism, don’t expect politicians like Andrew Cuomo to issue that sort of challenge any time soon.

– JVW

33 Responses to “Quelle Surprise! Cuomo’s “Free College” Initiative Underwhelms”

  1. Asking a student to take 15 hours of coursework in a semester would really cut in to their valuable time for activism.

    JVW (42615e)

  2. Kids owe the taxpayers billions because of college. It’s a disaster. So happy my daughters have no debt. And my granddaughter won’t.

    mg (13ae34)

  3. This was reported months ago or as soon as it started or even before (but of course not everybody got the news)

    Inside Higher Ed May 16, 2017

    https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/05/16/drawbacks-new-york-states-free-college-plan-essay

    Here are some key ways this piece of legislation could actually have a negative impact on students, faculty and staff members.

    The Excelsior Scholarship is not free college. The Excelsior Scholarship program is set up as a last-dollar plan, which means it will bridge the gaps for eligible students between their financial aid package and the institution’s tuition, covering no more than the full cost of tuition for eligible students. At the community college level, students are only eligible for a total of $5,500 under the program.

    Meanwhile, most CUNY students already do not pay tuition. In fact, 66 percent attend tuition-free, covered by Pell Grants and Tuition Assistance Program grants, while nearly half come from families with household incomes of less than $30,000, making them eligible to receive “full” financial aid…

    ….Finally, the application window for Excelsior is June 1 to July 15, giving students a very small time frame to apply for the aid — a window that many of the distracted, incredibly busy, time-strapped and underprepared urban students will surely miss.

    The credit accumulation requirement will be devastating to the neediest students. The Excelsior Scholarship requires that all students accumulate 30 credits in each academic year in order to maintain the scholarship. On paper that sounds simple enough. Obtaining 30 credits a year, times four years, means on-time graduation.

    But nationally, only about 60 percent of college students graduate with B.A. degrees in six years, finishing at a rate far slower than the 30-credits-a-year requirement would require. At CUNY, the five-year graduation rate is much lower, hovering around 30 to 33 percent in past years….

    Fortune Magazine, April 13, 2017:

    http://fortune.com/2017/04/13/free-college-tuition-new-york-excelsior-scholarship-pay-education-bill

    Gov. Cuomo’s plan, however, suffers from a potentially fatal flaw. At the last minute before the bill was signed, lawmakers included a clause that turns all tuition subsidies a student receives under the plan into a loan if they leave the state within four years of graduating (assuming they received four years worth of funding).

    New York Post April 11, 2017:

    https://nypost.com/2017/04/11/cuomos-free-tuition-program-comes-with-a-major-catch/

    Cuomo’s free tuition program comes with a major catch

    …Under a provision that was added to the tuition bill at the last moment, students who get a free ride at CUNY and SUNY schools must live and work in New York state for up to four years after graduation, or be forced to pay the money back.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    …Cuomo agreed with the change.

    “Why should New Yorkers pay for your college education and then you pick up and you move to California?” Cuomo said during a call with state editorial writers.

    “The concept of investing in you and your education is that you’re going to stay here and be an asset to the state. If you don’t want to stay here, then go to California now, let them pay for your college education.”

    But one professor of higher education slammed the proposal as “economically and educationally foolish.” ..

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    …Cuomo’s Excelsior Scholarship provides free in-state tuition for students from families with adjusted gross incomes of $125,000 or less. It is the first program of its kind in the country to fully subsidize tuition at both four-year and community colleges.

    Students must maintain a minimum grade-point average to qualify.

    Cuomo is expected to tout the program at a bill-signing ceremony Wednesday at La Guardia Community College in Queens.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    Students who receive free tuition and then leave the state for an advanced degree won’t have to pay the money back, assuming they return to New York once they complete their graduate studies. State officials also plan to make accommodations for graduates who leave the state for military service.

    Also see:

    Feb 23, 2017:

    https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2017/02/23/gov-cuomo-is-proposing-free-college-tuition-but-are-his-plans-rules-too-strict/ (This one is about students losing funding for TAP because of mistakes in picking courses. It says the new additional program – carries over much of the same requirements)

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  4. New York Post editorial three weeks ago, posted online August 6, 2018 8:05pm:

    https://nypost.com/2018/08/06/cuomos-shameful-scholarship-gag-order/

    Team Cuomo has put out a gag order: State university financial-aid offices can’t tell the press anything about how the Excelsior Scholarship program is working. Plainly, Gov. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t want any pesky facts undermining the “free college” TV ads his campaign is now airing.

    The gag notice went out after Sarah Buell of Erie Community College complained at a public meeting that Excelsior is in disarray….

    …“We have gone months without formal written guidance,” Buell said. “We are essentially, in our 64 campuses, establishing 64 different versions of this program.”

    Some 23,000 students are expected to receive Excelsior aid this year, but many applicants aren’t sure what the program provides or what they must do to keep the scholarship. Some haven’t even heard back — and classes start in just a few weeks.

    But Cuomo’s getting what he most wants: commercials touting his virtue. And never mind that his campaign had to end-run the laws on student privacy to recruit the kids for those ads….

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  5. Letting politicians micromanage the course curricula at our schools – what a wonderful, conservative idea!

    What could possibly go wrong?

    Dave (7f91aa)

  6. A cousin of Molllie Tibbetts family doesn’t like this focus on the background of the killer: (She says it is enough that he was a man.)

    https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/mollie-tibbetts-murder-family-racist-false-narrative-716255

    It is an interesting question why the killer used false employment documents if he didn’t need to. Or did he? Did the dairy farm exclusively hire illegal immigrants?

    Or was it just easier and cheaper than collecting documents and going to the DMV?

    Did he work under a false name?

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  7. 5. The politicians are interested in reducing the costs of the scholarship program by putting in a lot of catch-22s.

    Apparently even the college financial aid officers don’t know all the ins and outs of it.

    https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Aid-official-Excelsior-scholarship-has-lots-of-13124209.php

    If a private company planned to get people to disqualify themselves from some offer, they’d be sued. It sounds almost as bad as the federal college loan forgiveness program.

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  8. Letting politicians micromanage the course curricula at our schools – what a wonderful, conservative idea!

    If the taxpayer is gonna pay for it, then the taxpayer is damn well going to dictate the content. If the state of New York decides that Peace and Justice Studies isn’t leading to gainful employment, then the Peace and Justice Studies degree is going to have to be reserved for private schools like Bard and Columbia. Let the kids who are in school on the taxpayers largess study Business, Nursing, Engineering, Health Administration, and other vocations that lead to actual paying jobs.

    JVW (42615e)

  9. I think that’s where the leftist faculty at state universities is whistling past the graveyard. They think they will get more money from government without any strings attached. Well lots of luck to you in that regard, professor.

    JVW (42615e)

  10. Trade Schools to the rescue. Learn to work with your hands and solve problems.

    mg (148243)

  11. A friends son went to welding school right out of high school, graduating in 2 years, 4 years later he is knocking down $125,000.00/year. He now is welding underwater making close to a half million a year.

    mg (456edd)

  12. King Cuomo II is a deceitful cuck. Sadly,while he will get my vote, Marc Molinaro has no shot in a state overrun with nonhackers and losers, all with their grubby paws out.

    Bugg (8aed21)

  13. @Sammy Finkelman:It is an interesting question why the killer used false employment documents if he didn’t need to. Or did he?

    It is illegal to examine anyone’s documents before you hire them. That is “document abuse”.

    If you get hired for a job, and then show fake documents, you are home free. If you are illegal, your employer has done nothing illegal by hiring you and accepting your documents. If you show no documents you get fired, so yes you need fake documents. But they don’t have to be very good fakes because questioning an employee’s documents opens the employer to liability under Title VII, but accepting them absolves the employer of liability.

    E-Verify changes none of this, except giving the employer the option to fire someone who comes up non-confirmed–but allows for the perfectly legal continued employment of that person should the employer choose not to fire them.

    “Q. What happens if I properly complete and retain a Form I-9 and DHS discovers that my employee is not actually authorized to work?

    A. You cannot be charged with a verification violation. You will also have a good faith defense against the imposition of employer sanctions penalties for knowingly hiring an unauthorized individual, unless the government can show you had knowledge of the unauthorized status of the employee.”

    Nemo (64d4e1)

  14. Nemo @13

    It is illegal to examine anyone’s documents before you hire them. That is “document abuse”.

    What do you mean? They are frequently requested. The Census Bureau did..

    What is illegal is to require more proof from some people than others based on national origin or other characteristics, I think also they are only supposed to be asked for at a point when a decision to hire has been made. What the employer is supposed to do is fire someone after they can’t produce it. A fine way to run a business. E-verify would work that way, too, complete with an appeals system.

    If you show no documents you get fired, so yes you need fake documents. But they don’t have to be very good fakes

    Employers are not the document police.

    because questioning an employee’s documents opens the employer to liability under Title VII, but accepting them absolves the employer of liability.

    The liability is for asking for more proof from some people than from others.

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  15. King Cuomo II of course should get the vote of any non-radical in the Democratic primary Sept. 13..

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  16. @Sammy: What do you mean? They are frequently requested.

    I mean what I said.

    “Ensure that the employee completes Section 1 of Form I-9 at the time of hire. “Hire” means the beginning of employment in exchange for wages or other remuneration. The time of hire is noted on the form as the first day of employment. Employees may complete Section 1 before the time of hire, but no earlier than acceptance of the job offer.

    Nemo (64d4e1)

  17. If the taxpayer is gonna pay for it, then the taxpayer is damn well going to dictate the content.

    Yeah, no. The First Amendment says otherwise.

    It is entirely proper for the taxpayers, through their representatives, to decide how much financial support to provide for education, or even not to provide such support at all. But political control over the content of what is taught is another matter entirely.

    Let the kids who are in school on the taxpayers largess study Business, Nursing, Engineering, Health Administration, and other vocations that lead to actual paying jobs.

    I’m sure the Department of Creation Studies will be a great success too.

    I don’t think the CA legislature even has the authority do what you suggest, and that’s a good thing. The California Constitution stipulates that “the university shall be entirely independent of all political and sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appointment of its Regents and in the administration of its affairs.” Other states may have similar protections.

    The Regents of the University of California have ultimate authority over the management of the system. They have delegated significant portions of that responsibility to the professional educators who make up the system.

    As for your suggested reforms, I can give my impressions.

    Requiring professors to teach more classes would accomplish little other than reducing the research or creative output of the faculty. At my university, shortage of classroom space is a far more stringent limitation than shortage of teachers.

    “Closing departments that don’t serve a great number of students” is another red herring – in practice department size and budget is basically proportional to the number of classroom hours. Small departments share administrative staff, so there is very little overhead in creating a department or program on paper.

    Having a smattering of unusual courses is nothing new; indeed some of the course titles are easy to laugh at (and often that is intentional, to draw student interest). I currently chair the faculty committee that reviews and votes on all new course proposals at my University. We absolutely do reject courses that lack academic rigor, or send them back to be redesigned to pass muster. Education is not always about learning facts, it also means being exposed to new ideas and learning different ways to think.

    “Concentrate on larger courses” sounds good on paper, but in first place, we already do (that is where the vast bulk of the classroom hours are taught), and in the second place, those large courses should be complemented by education in smaller classes, where the students have more direct interaction with teachers. I don’t think you’ll find many students who would tell you their 300-person Introductory Calculus or General Chemistry courses were anything they looked forward to. Smaller, more specialized courses are far more engaging and intellectually stimulating.

    As for the time to graduate, it is a constant topic of discussion. Literally no academic policy decision is taken without reference to its possible effects. On the other hand, students have their own lives, and all have individual reasons for the courseloads and path to graduation they choose. We have a responsibility to make it possible for them to finish in four years, with reasonable effort, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for us as educators to dictate what they can and can’t do in terms of courseloads just to make our statistical benchmarks look better.

    Dave (445e97)

  18. It is entirely proper for the taxpayers, through their representatives, to decide how much financial support to provide for education, or even not to provide such support at all. But political control over the content of what is taught is another matter entirely.

    OK, so maybe I was being a little glib there when I said that the taxpayer is going to dictate content. No, I don’t think that there should be some sort of civilian board deciding which classes are taught and what the syllabus should be for each class. But if the public puts in a greater — cough, cough — “investment” into higher education I think that you will see state legislatures pair that with some pretty strict financial reforms. This is why the Excelsior Scholarships are failing: because even Cuomo and Comrade Bernie know that the taxpayer isn’t going to want to foot the bill for Johnny and Susie to spend six years languidly working their way towards an Bachelors in Art History, and perhaps students don’t think it’s such a good idea to commit to living in New York for a designated period after they graduate. Even here in dopey California, the already over-burdened taxpayer — even if he or she is a Kamala Harris fan — is going to wonder how the state possibly benefits by letting students chase a degree in sociology or physical education on the taxpayer dime when the state needs more medical professionals to deal with our aging population.

    “Closing departments that don’t serve a great number of students” is another red herring – in practice department size and budget is basically proportional to the number of classroom hours.

    Please don’t act like political considerations don’t also dictate what disciplines are given departmental status. When I was doing business at UCLA in the mid-1990s one of the big issues was that left-wing Latino students wanted their own Department of Latino Studies with their own office space, faculty appointments, etc. At the time the UCLA administration was patiently pointing out to the activists that there would not be an adequate number of students majoring in the discipline to justify having a separate department (students back then could pursue a Latino Studies degree as a cross-discipline program). But after a decade or so of activism, lo and behold the administration buckled under and created the program as a separate department, even though I seriously doubt there are all that many more students majoring in that field than there were in the 1990s. And the department is so vital and well-run that information on their website is more than a full year out of date. So that strikes me as a really huge waste of taxpayer dollars to placate the social justice mob.

    I’m sure the Department of Creation Studies will be a great success too.

    Show me a public university where that exists, Dave.

    JVW (42615e)

  19. Sammy, he’s probably taking one for the company, they probably have an “in” with labor from that pueblo (which would make him susceptible to a snitch looking to make good with the hefe). That arrangement also points to better than street vendor quality fake documents, even willing SSN “renting” of the sort I’ve mentioned before (A person who appears to the IRS as a 70 hour, 60K employee, but is actually 2 to 3 illegals working the same persona).

    urbanleftbehind (2b82d0)

  20. As per Lord Cuomo, America was never that great anyways. Apply this to anything he says and you’ve got him pretty well fixed.

    harkin (0f0199)

  21. This is why the Excelsior Scholarships are failing: because even Cuomo and Comrade Bernie know that the taxpayer isn’t going to want to foot the bill for Johnny and Susie to spend six years languidly working their way towards an Bachelors in Art History, and perhaps students don’t think it’s such a good idea to commit to living in New York for a designated period after they graduate.

    Your complaint seems to be that this program (which you clearly disapprove of) isn’t spending enough money due to a variety of reasonable features. I am not an expert on undergraduate financial aid, by any means, but requirement to apply for all available federal aid, and timely progress toward degree are pretty standard fare. The post-graduation requirement is a bit odd, and could be a disincentive (if enforceable), but it seems reasonable if the goal of the state program is to train people for the state’s labor force. Many countries, I think, have similar strings attached to scholarship programs they offer which support study abroad. ROTC, and obviously the service academies, have a similar deals too. Whether it works as intended, like every government program, we have to wait and see…

    At the time the UCLA administration was patiently pointing out to the activists that there would not be an adequate number of students majoring in the discipline to justify having a separate department (students back then could pursue a Latino Studies degree as a cross-discipline program).

    None of that really contradicts anything I wrote. Creating a department can be done to indicate an intention to grow and develop a specialized faculty by committing more resources. But it can also be done for essentially cosmetic reasons.

    Regardless, there is no such thing as a large department that doesn’t teach a proportionately large amount of student-hours. That doesn’t mean most of the students have to be majors in the department. Indeed, even in physics – certainly a traditional and academically rigorous discipline – we teach far more engineers, chemists and biology students than actual physics majors.

    Show me a public university where that exists, Dave.

    Your position seemed to be that it would perfectly fine to legislate one into existence if a sufficient number of politicians decided they wanted one.

    Dave (445e97)

  22. The Law & Order President strikes again:

    Crack dealer’s defense lawyer to jury: The president says prosecutions that use evidence from cooperating witnesses can’t be trusted

    The defense lawyer only got a few words into his attempt to point out President Trump’s “flipper” remarks to the jury before the prosecutors objected and the judge (an *Obama* appointee, Narciso!) told him to STFU.

    Dave (445e97)

  23. bah, wrong thread! Doh!

    Dave (445e97)

  24. Your complaint seems to be that this program (which you clearly disapprove of) isn’t spending enough money due to a variety of reasonable features. I am not an expert on undergraduate financial aid, by any means, but requirement to apply for all available federal aid, and timely progress toward degree are pretty standard fare. The post-graduation requirement is a bit odd, and could be a disincentive (if enforceable), but it seems reasonable if the goal of the state program is to train people for the state’s labor force. Many countries, I think, have similar strings attached to scholarship programs they offer which support study abroad. ROTC, and obviously the service academies, have a similar deals too. Whether it works as intended, like every government program, we have to wait and see…

    Nope, you missed the point of my post and perhaps that is my fault (though perhaps you are intentionally missing the point). I object to politicians using the promise of “free” stuff to gain favorable publicity among their constituents and announcing it with a big to-do complete with lots of fawning coverage from a mindless media, when in fact the program is so narrowly tailored so as to be far from what is promised. Here is the fact: Cuomo and Uncle Bernie touted “free” tuition to the “middle class,” yet we know that the middle class was defined in such a way as to pretty much exclude a huge chunk of it, and enough conditions were put on the program so as to make it unlikely that too many of the families who were actually eligible would qualify.

    You know what they could have done instead? They could have taken that money and announced that students who graduate and go to work in New York state in an area that the state determines is valuable (teaching, health care, public safety, etc.) would be refunded one year’s worth of tuition for each year that they worked, up to four years total or two years in an associate’s program. So instead of having the state pay your tuition and then be theoretically obligated to work there after graduating (I still want to see how they try to manage that trick), the student could borrow the money (if the state really wanted to they could become the lender and then just forgive the sums) and then get it back a portion of it each year they chose to stay in state. But of course that type of program is not as sexy for progressives because it’s hard to glibly apply the word “free,” and perhaps Comrade Sanders wouldn’t want to come and give his benediction if it were that ho-hum.

    Let’s see what happens when the first graduates of this program are minted and claim that they are unable to find a job in the Empire State. Will the state really demand a repayment of the loans? If the student simply decides to default, what will the state do then? Is Elizabeth Warren going to say that it’s totally OK for the state of New York to ruin a student’s credit history after complaining about banks doing the same? What if the student takes a job as a barista or a lifeguard or restaurant hostess somewhere in New York? Is the state obligated to accept that work? What a waste it will be if people feel like they have to take a low-paying job and live at home in New York because taking a job in another state would trigger the loan repayments. I guess we’ll find out in three years.

    JVW (42615e)

  25. Not entirely OT
    FL Democrats pick for their gubenatorial candidate a Sanders endorsed leftist, clearing the chances of Trump enthusiast DeSantis to win in Nov.
    (There were three other candidates, all of whom had a much better chance of beating DeSantis.)

    kishnevi (9052c0)

  26. Whose sort of under criminal investigation, but Greene ad blitzkrieg made one very nauseous, and his other tadpole, Grayson lost as well.

    Narciso (369281)

  27. In the end, they couldn’t beam her up:

    miamiherald.com
    https://www.google.com/amp/amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article217440515.html

    Narciso (369281)

  28. They’re looking at the problem from the wrong direction. They have a bloated beast, namely their public college and university system, and they’re looking for more ways to feed it. If they want to make it affordable for deserving students, pursuing useful courses of study, they should simply cut tuition by 75% by reducing the size of the beast by 75%. Wholesale cuts of entire departments and programs; admission to the useful subjects of only the top 25% of the current admittees; selloff of the unused buildings; concomitant cuts of administrative and maintenance personnel.

    [Insert additional comments about sports programs; remedial programs for illiterates; the so-called soft sciences; workfare for academics and administrators; and how those should be left to private schools for people who want to waste their own money on them, here.]

    nk (dbc370)

  29. remedial programs for illiterates extend to post graduate courses now.

    steveg (a9dcab)

  30. Even law school. I’ll bet you’ve met some of those. Nice set of canine teeth you’ve got there mister nk

    steveg (a9dcab)

  31. 24. JVW (42615e) — 8/28/2018 @ 7:46 pm

    If the student simply decides to default, what will the state do then?

    send them a bill demanding money. But not seriously try to collect it, unless they win the lottery or something.

    ‘Or, if they earn a lot, wait up to ten years and then sue.

    Is Elizabeth Warren going to say that it’s totally OK for the state of New York to ruin a student’s credit history after complaining about banks doing the same?

    No she’s not going to say that.

    If that is what New York State will do, she’ll just ignore the fact that New York State is doing that, if she is still interested in the subject at that point!

    Like the way in Congress they never complain about non-private colleges.

    What if the student takes a job as a barista or a lifeguard or restaurant hostess somewhere in New York? Is the state obligated to accept that work?

    Yes, yes. On;y oving out of state effectuates the penalty.

    What a waste it will be if people feel like they have to take a low-paying job and live at home in New York because taking a job in another state would trigger the loan repayments.

    all of New York State they can’t find a similar job?

    I guess we’ll find out in three years

    The news media aren’t that quick to pick up on things.

    Sammy Finkelman (02a146)

  32. Nope, you missed the point of my post and perhaps that is my fault (though perhaps you are intentionally missing the point). I object to politicians using the promise of “free” stuff to gain favorable publicity among their constituents and announcing it with a big to-do complete with lots of fawning coverage from a mindless media, when in fact the program is so narrowly tailored so as to be far from what is promised. Here is the fact: Cuomo and Uncle Bernie touted “free” tuition to the “middle class,” yet we know that the middle class was defined in such a way as to pretty much exclude a huge chunk of it, and enough conditions were put on the program so as to make it unlikely that too many of the families who were actually eligible would qualify

    Well, again, the restrictions do not seem different from what one would expect in any scholarship program, apart from the post-graduation requirement, and the means test, which seems pretty generous to me ($110-$125K/year is certainly not lower middle class income, and strikes me as quite a bit closer to “rich” than “poor”…).

    While I don’t subscribe to the Trumpian nihilist “burn-it-all-down” school for higher-education reform, any more than I do for government reform, my opinion is that it is too easy and too cheap to attend college, and that a lot of students attending college might be better served by some other trajectory (including possibly attending college later, once they are more prepared to invest the effort to benefit from it).

    More and more, the college is becoming like the second four-years of high school. Heavy subsidies encourage people to buy the “product” even if its worth to them is less than the cost of providing it. I think merit-based scholarships are preferable.

    Dave (445e97)

  33. Possibly helpful hint for SUNY and CUNY attendees: The FBI has published its Ten Most Wanted list since 1950. In that time, it has arrested fugitives who got on it in 47 states, except Alaska, Maine and Delaware.

    nk (dbc370)


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