ALBANY — Six years ago, Andrew Cuomo and Hillary Clinton came together for a self-congratulatory event that felt and sounded suspiciously like a presidential pep rally.
Ostensibly, the pair were at LaGuardia Community College in Queens to celebrate the passage of the Excelsior Scholarship Program, which Cuomo called “an outrageously ambitious but an irrefutably smart idea” to help New York residents pay for college at State University of New York and City University of New York schools. The then-governor said he’d enacted one of the best proposals from Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“The idea is very simple,” Cuomo said. “We have free public college for any family who’s making $125,000 or below so no child will be denied college because they can’t afford it and the dream of opportunity is for everyone.”
Free public college. Those were the words that anyone watching would have taken from the event, including children dreaming of someday attending college but worried about how their families would pay for it. Cuomo promised they could set those worries aside.
“This scholarship program is going to transform lives,” Cuomo said to enthusiastic cheers. “Tonight, there will be no child who puts their head on the pillow and wonders whether they’re going to have a chance to make it.”
Reality never lived up to that grand rhetoric. Not even close.
As Times Union education reporter Kathleen Moore recently wrote, only a sliver of State University of New York students — less than 10 percent — take advantage of the Excelsior scholarship. And those who do participate in the supposedly “free public college” program continue to cough up many thousands of dollars for their education.
At the University at Albany, for example, “free public college” costs nearly $20,000 annually if room…
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