The Excelsior Scholarship was hailed as a free tuition initiative at its April 2016 launch, but recent reports have shown most students attending state colleges do not receive it.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has continued to support the scholarship, calling it an opportunity to open doors for students to attend State University of New York and City University of New York schools.
“Nearly 80 percent or more than 940,000 families with college-aged children across New York would qualify for tuition-free college at SUNY and CUNY,” Cuomo said in January 2017, according to the Watertown Daily Times.
According to reports from the 2017-2018 school year, however, the average number of students who received the award is much lower. The Center for Urban Future reported in August 2018 that the program awarded 20,086 scholarships in 2017-2018, which is 3.2 percent of the 633,543 undergraduate students in New York.
Of the 75,000 students who applied for the scholarship when it was first introduced, only 23,000 qualified, according to The New York Times. The Center for Urban Future reported that most of the students were turned away because they did not meet the requirement of 30 credits per academic year.
“It was a big learning experience for the college and the financial aid community during the first year of the Excelsior Scholarship,” said Todd Moravec, financial aid director at Plattsburgh State, where 6.3 percent of students last year received the scholarship.
Moravec said the credit minimums and other requirements were not as well publicized as the scholarship’s selling points of free tuition, creating confusion for students and financial aid staff alike.
“What [Gov. Cuomo] didn’t say, or at least in the news coverage I watched, was all these provisions,” said Katie Short, a senior creative writing and political science major at Oswego State.
Short said that, though she currently has the scholarship, credit requirements were a concern for her because she had taken college courses in high school. She said decreasing the requirement to 24 credits per year, about 12 per semester, could help alleviate this problem for her and other students.
“Twelve [credits] is full-time, so why can’t 12 be full-time in association with this scholarship?” Short said.
Kevin Ozgercin, associate professor and politics, economics and law department chair at SUNY Old Westbury, said he would like to see Excelsior include part-time students as well.
“It’s a privilege to go to school full-time,” Ozgercin said. “In some ways, part-time students have a greater need.”
Another limiting qualification of the scholarship was the requirement to complete degrees without taking time off or extra years or semesters to finish, David Chen at The New York Times said. Randolph Hohle, associate professor of sociology at SUNY Fredonia, said life complications can make it hard to meet those requirements and complete a degree on time.
“I don’t think that it’s actually a reasonable assumption to think that an undergraduate is going to graduate in four years,” Hohle said. “Over the course of four years, you’re never supposed to get sick [or] have a bad semester.”
The scholarship’s maximum income qualifications also contributed to the low numbers in the program’s first couple years: $100,000 adjusted gross income at its launch for the 2017-2018 school year and $110,000 for 2018-2019. The scholarship’s final income cap raise will be $125,000 for 2019-2020, according to a March 2018 press release from Cuomo’s office.
Mark Humbert, financial aid director at Oswego State, said the income cap raise has helped the number of Excelsior Scholarship awards increase by over 50 percent at Oswego State, from 632 awards in the 2017-2018 school year to 915 awards in the 2018-2019 school year so far.
“We worked really hard to leverage this new scholarship and help our students,” Humbert said.
Though the income threshold increase is generally a good thing, Hohle said, it does not account for the disparity in cost of living throughout the state. Hohle said that is reason enough to get rid of the income cap.
“If you include more people, especially more high-income people, I think the data would show that the probability of success rate of degree completion would probably go up, which means the program would look better for future expansion,” Hohle said.
In addition to limiting qualification factors, SUNY professors said the Excelsior Scholarship does not cover enough, leaving plenty of room for improvement.
The scholarship currently acts as a last dollar program, so any other forms of aid, like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the state’s Tuition Assistance Program, apply to tuition first. Excelsior will then cover up to $5,500 of the remaining cost of tuition, and state grants will cover what is left.
Moravec said he is worried schools could one day be left to pay that gap covered by state grants, and it would be better to increase the $5,500 limit.
“I’d like to see the legislation change and the maximum award amount to the full SUNY tuition,” Moravec said. “I think that would help campuses a lot.”
The scholarship’s last dollar quality also means that, though tuition is technically free, students have to pay for room and board if they live on campus, which often exceeds the cost of tuition.
“There should be something for that because, while it’s nice to [be] paid for our school, living is also a huge deal,” Short said.
Another change that would benefit students, Moravec said, is to adjust when the award amount shows up on the students’ bills, currently much later than other forms of aid.
“Ideally, I think that the application needs to be bumped up and put on a schedule that’s more similar to the application process for TAP so that awards will be made available earlier,” Moravec said.
Robert Spitzer, political science department chair at SUNY Cortland, said the university has taken a different approach to solve that issue until the state changes the program, applying the award amount for qualified students on their bill immediately. The school will then be reimbursed that amount by the scholarship, so SUNY Cortland has to face the delay, not the students.
Despite its flaws, the Excelsior Scholarship has helped increase attendance at SUNY and CUNY schools by 10 percent, the Watertown Daily Times reported.
The program’s requirements for students to remain in the state for the same amount of time they received the scholarship means these students also enter the state’s workforce and boost the economy in the state, Ozgercin said.
“It’s a wise policy decision for Albany to institute a program like this that would enable the state to retain more of their college graduates,” Ozgercin said.
Hohle said the program helps students and the state as a whole because of its dedication to improving education.
“The immediate benefits will be the students going to the college because they are going to have a lot less money to have to pay out of pocket,” Hohle said. “The long-term benefit will be New York state residents because they’re going to have a generation of college graduates not saddled with student loan debt.”
Though that economic benefit means that Excelsior is generally well-liked by officials on both sides of the political aisle, Spitzer said the program still faces opposition from private colleges, particularly smaller ones that could see their attendance drop from students choosing SUNY schools instead due to cost.
“The main backlash or resentment toward the program comes not so much from conservatives or Republicans, but comes from private colleges and universities because they feel like this is…drawing students away from them,” Spitzer said.
Ozgercin said some citizens may oppose the scholarship as well because they may simply misunderstand it as one that takes money from taxpayers to create an unfair system.
“There are some people on the right who are skeptical of taxes and all sorts of programs like these,” Ozgercin said. “[But] students aren’t receiving a check of taxpayer dollars. They’re not being charged tuition for a seat that would be empty otherwise.”
Though some said the program is sure to stick around and possibly expand in much-needed areas, Ozgercin said the political climate makes the program’s future anything but certain.
“The Excelsior Scholarship would be the first thing on the chopping block if the economy overheats, as it’s starting to do,” Ozgercin said.
Photo by Shea McCarthy | The Oswegonian
