Early this year, Gov. Cuomo announced his plan to enable New Yorkers who earn less than $125,000 to enroll at SUNY or CUNY without paying tuition. I argued that the plan was bad for the state; skewed to the upper middle class, it delivered taxpayer dollars to students and families who already had affordable options for higher education and did do nothing to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their more well-off peers.
But this week, New York State policymakers managed to take a bad proposal for free tuition and make it even worse. In the eleventh hour, a provision was added to Cuomo’s plan which will require students to live in New York for as long as they received the Excelsior Scholarship.
Students who move out of state will see their generous scholarship benefits converted to a loan that needs to be paid back.
The goal of the provision is to keep more college graduates in-state. The idea is that it’ll increase the return on taxpayer dollars....
Read the entire piece here at New York Daily News
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Beth Akers is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and coauthor of "Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt."
This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News