CUNY: Cuomo's "Free Tuition" Scam

If You Work, or You’re an Immigrant – Forget About It!

CUNY: Cuomo’s “Free Tuition” Scam
A Racist, Anti-Working-Class Scheme

By Class Struggle Education Workers

From left: Bernie Sanders, Andrew Cuomo and William C. Thomson (chairperson of CUNY Board of Trustees) at LaGuardia Community College where the Excelsior scholarship was announced.  (Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)

It was a big PR show: At LaGuardia College in January 2017, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, with Bernie Sanders at his side, unveiled a new plan for “free tuition” at the City and State universities of New York (CUNY and SUNY). Sanders proclaimed it a “revolutionary idea for higher education.” This might actually qualify as “fake news.” If you’re a CUNY student, struggling to get by, working part time, skipping lunches, behind in the rent, or were born someplace else, this plan will not help you.

How many things are wrong with it? Let’s count the ways:

• The Excelsior scholarship (as it’s called) only applies to students enrolled full time. So if you go to school part time (like 33 percent of CUNY students), you are excluded. (That’s one-third of CUNY students, or 84,000 students.)
• If you are not a citizen or “eligible non-citizen”), you are excluded. (An estimated 8,300 students are undocumented.)
• If you don’t meet the 12-month NY State residency requirement, you are excluded. (That’s the majority of immigrant and undocumented students.)
• If you have not graduated from high school in the U.S., earned a high-school equivalency or passed the “Ability to Benefit” test, you are excluded.
• If you have gone to CUNY or SUNY but haven’t completed at least 30 credits each year (successively), you are excluded. (Some loopholes apply.)
• If you are in default on any student loans, you are excluded.
• An estimated 90 percent of community college students will be excluded because they can’t graduate in two years.
• If your family has a combined federal income of more than $100,000 you are excluded.

But that’s not all, folks. There are numerous ways in which the grant can retroactively become a loan.

• If you get the grant but don’t graduate in four years, you will have to pay all the grant money back. (Thus you’ll be more likely to become indebted.)
• If you graduate and don’t stay in NY for as many years as you received the scholarship, the grant becomes a loan.

But that’s still not all:

• Excelsior is what’s called a “last dollar award.” That means you only get the money to cover tuition on top of the Pell Grant and TAP. So if you already have tuition covered this way, you can’t get the money, even if you desperately need it for all the additional expenses.
• AND, get this, tuition has been increased at $200 a year for the next five years at all SUNY and CUNY schools.

So who does the Excelsior scholarship help?

• What they call “traditional” students, that is, middle-class families where the kids don’t have to work, but probably where only one parent works. You know anybody like that?
• Cuomo – in his bid to look like a “progressive Democrat.”
• Sanders – ditto.
• Hillary Clinton, who boasted on Twitter: “Let’s celebrate New York State getting something important done…. A great step for progressives.”

Are You Ready for More Statistics?

If your eyes are not glazed over yet, here are some additional important stats from a survey of CUNY undergraduate students in 2016:

• About 60% of students report annual household income of less than $30,000. Community college students are more likely to come from low-income families than their counterparts at senior colleges (71% vs 54%).
• Fifty-three percent of CUNY students work for pay. A higher percentage of senior college students work for pay than community college students (54% vs. 50%), but a slightly lower percentage of senior college students work more than 20 hours per week than community college students who work (49% vs. 52%).
• Of working students, the majority (79%) work to pay for living expenses. More than half (55%) report that they work to pay tuition expenses.
• Total CUNY student population 2016  =  272,957.

We Demand: Free Tuition, Open Admissions

A 14 September article in the Indypendent by Queens college student Amir Khafagy said: “What was supposed to be a plan to spread equality, will end up being a plan that is not only pure and adulterated racism but unhinged class warfare.”  He’s right, except that instead of “supposed to be” it should say “was dishonestly pitched as.” 

Far from Cuomo’s plan being “revolutionary,” let’s remember that up until 1976, CUNY charged no tuition at all. Generations of students from working-class and immigrant families graduated from CCNY, Hunter and the other campuses. So what happened? Answer: Racist reaction and capitalist cutbacks. 

In 1969, CUNY was 96 percent white. This was the era of an upswing in radicalizing movements against racist oppression. At City College there was a massive student strike and building occupation, first launched by a couple of hundred black and Puerto Rican students. They initially demanded raising African American and Puerto Rican enrollment and instituting Black and Puerto Rican studies. The struggle was expanded to demand the right to a university education for every high-school graduate. 

In one year the number of black, Latino and Asian freshmen at CUNY increased seven times. Everybody benefited – the next freshman class grew by 75 percent, as well as dramatically increased numbers of minorities; white working-class youth benefited as well, making it harder for racists to pit them against doubly-oppressed sectors. (See “How Open Admissions Was Won in 1969 and Debates on the Struggle at CUNY Today,” Revolution No. 6, April 2009.)

Open admissions was a gain of the black freedom movement. Everybody knew the quality of education students received under what was called the system of “educational apartheid” depended on your race, class and zip code. Students in underfunded, overcrowded, neglected areas of poverty got the worst deal. So to overcome this, civil rights advocates said: if you somehow managed to get through high school, no matter who, no matter where, you had a right to an equal chance at CUNY. 

Then the backlash began, spurred on by Wall Street bankers and carried out by Democrats through a financial dictatorship embodied in the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) and Municipal Assistance Corporation (nicknamed Big MAC). It was linked to an attack on the city budget in the mid-’70s that included deferring maintenance on public infrastructure and forcing CUNY to charge tuition. 

By 1976, tuition was imposed at CUNY, and it has risen every year. Important programs such as writing labs and ESL classes to assist students have been cut back. The army of “adjunct” teachers and professors, with miserable low pay and no job protection, has risen nationwide. 

The asssault continued through the Reagan years and then, under racist mayor Rudolph Giuliani, backed up by the cops, there was a campaign to roll back open admissions. Student protesters fought this every step of the way, but with union leaders tying city labor to the Democrats, the power of the working class was not brought into the fight – and our side lost.

In 1998, the NYPD locked down central Harlem against protesters demanding the right to march in the Million Youth March, and in 1999 CUNY Board of Trustees meetings were barricaded at LaGuardia Community College. This was the same year that the NYPD gunned down African immigrant Amadou Diallo in the doorway to his Bronx home. Students were arrested at CCNY at a conference demanding freedom for black radical death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. 

As we wrote at the time, “The aim of the war on CUNY is to eliminate what remains of ‘open admissions’ in this huge institution of 200,000 students on 20 campuses” (“Smash Racist Purge of CUNY – Fight for Open Admissions, Free Tuition” (February 1999), reprinted in Internationalist special supplement, Marxism and the Battle over Education [2nd edition, January 2008]).

In the turmoil after the 2016 elections, some politicians tried to play up their alleged “pro-working-class” credentials in the interests of revitalizing the capitalist Democratic Party. There is the Campaign to Make CUNY Free Again, which is pressuring Cuomo, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, and the City Council to make CUNY tuition-free through “a tax on the richest 1% of New York City.” They are trying to hitch their wagon to left-talking bourgeois politicians like Bernie Sanders, who uses populist rhetoric to make people believe that all but the richest 1% have the same immediate interests, and get disillusioned youth to vote Democrat in 2018.

This is precisely what the Bernie boosters did as the presidential campaign was heating up in late 2015 with the Million Student March organized by Socialist Alternative and the youth group of the Democratic Socialists of America, along with a plethora of pro-Sanders student groups from various colleges. The march was ostensibly about the outrageous cost of higher education and the poverty wages paid to campus workers. But in large part it was about shoring up youth support for the Democrats. As we wrote at the time:

“The official demands – tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt, $15 minimum wage for campus workers – are supportable in themselves. But why is this coming up now? Because election season has begun – for elections a year from now! – and this latest would-be movement is designed to pressure the Democrats.”

–“Getting An Education Seems Almost Impossible? It’s the Capitalist System!” Revolution No. 12, March 2016.

The truth is, open admissions was won in 1969 through a joint mobilization of black, Latino, and radical white students, with the demand for free higher education endorsed by regional unions, including the powerful subway and bus workers. This points to what’s required to win today, amid an all-out capitalist assault on public education, with union-busting charter schools and a multi-tiered CUNY that leaves working-class students high and dry.

You don’t have to take Marxism 101 to know what fighters from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X knew: the fight against the bedrock of racial oppression in the USA will be fought out in the streets, not at the ballot box, let alone by backing the capitalist parties and politicians who’ve administered this racist system from Day One. And key to this is winning the support of the ranks of the powerful NYC city unions that brought their weight into the struggle for open admissions back in the day. That includes the TWU Local 100 subway and bus workers that can shut down the city cold; the huge 1199 (hospital workers) and DC37 city work forces, and others. To win we need students and workers in joint struggle. And first and foremost, we must break from all parties of the exploiters and oppressors – in a massive class struggle led by a revolutionary party. Interested students should come to a study group or literature table of the Internationalist Clubs at CUNY. ■

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. See the CSEW program here.