NY Scholarship Program Aids Just 2% of CUNY Students: Study

NEW YORK, NY — Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised his "Excelsior Scholarship" would provide "tuition-free" college to middle-class New Yorkers, winning praise from left-wing hero Bernie Sanders. But the state-wide program has only helped a tiny handful of New York City students, who are more likely to need financial aid, a new study shows.

"(T)he program is serving very few of the students who could benefit the most from free tuition," reads the report by the Center for an Urban Future.

Some 4,155 students attending CUNY colleges received Excelsior Scholarship awards in the 2017-18 school year — just 1.7 percent of the system's total undergraduate student body, the report published Friday says.

They account for roughly a fifth of the 20,086 students across the state whom the program helped that year, the report says. That's just 3.2 percent of the state's undergraduates.

The Excelsior Scholarship offers "tuition-free" education at SUNY and CUNY colleges to New York State resident families and individuals who earn up to $125,000 a year, a state website says. Cuomo, a Democrat, announced the program last year alongside Sanders, who campaigned on free college in his 2016 presidential bid.

The roughly $163 million program is meant to supplement other existing financial aid to help students fill any gaps, according to a state handout.

But its hefty requirement that beneficiaries earn at least 30 credits each year they're in school shuts out most students, the study says. Nearly twice as many Excelsior applicants were rejected for "not sufficient credits" as the number who got awards through the program this year, according to the report.

The city has a disproportionately small number of Excelsior scholars given its large share of low-income students, the study shows.

Four upstate senior colleges each got more Excelsior awards than all of New York City's community colleges, even though 71 percent of CUNY community college students report having household income below $30,000, the report says.

Cuomo's office contested several of the report's findings, saying the study included students who weren't eligible for the Exclsior Scholarship and didn't factor in those helped by other financial aid programs.

The report also misstated Excelsior applicant figures, the governor's office said — about 46,000 of the roughly 95,000 students who applied were eligible for the scholarship, but only around 23,000 needed it because the rest already had their tuition covered.

"New York is expanding college access and making it affordable and the Center for an Urban Future shouldn’t stand in the way of that progress," Cuomo spokesman Don Kaplan said in a statement.

About 210,000 , or 53 percent, of full-time CUNY and SUNY students who are state residents go to school tuition-free thanks to the state's various financial aid programs, Kaplan said. Additionally, taking 15 credits each semester helps students graduate in four years and reduce their student debt, the governor's office said.

But Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, whom Cuomo will face in next month's primary election, seized on the report's dim figures to call the Excelsior program "fake."

"For Andrew Cuomo, it turns out that promising 'free college' for all is just another way to grab headlines," Nixon said in a statement.

Cuomo campaign spokeswoman Abbey Collins said the governor has led the state to make "college more affordable for students while reducing student debt and investing in our world-class universities — we’ll leave the baseless election-year rhetoric to others."

(Lead image: Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the Excelsior Scholarship alongside Bernie Sanders in January 2017. Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo)