NYPIRG says no thanks to proposed tuition hike
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- November
- 30
The New York Public Interest Research Group, a student-directed organization, is against the 5 percent tuition hike proposed by the State University of New York trustees this week, said Rebecca J. Weber, executive director. The state should fund SUNY sufficiently so trustees don’t have to seek a tuition hike, she said.
“A tuition hike is very, very difficult for students. Financial aid doesn’t cover costs. It’s very, very hard,” she said.
SUNY is requesting an 8.5 percent increase—$99.8 million—over its current $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for its state-operated campuses and system administration. The last time tuition at SUNY’s four-year schools went up was in 2003, when it was raised 28 percent to $4,350 a year for in-state students.
With small, regular tuition hikes, which SUNY is looking at, there’s no protection for students against large increases if the state has a bad budget year, Weber said. “The difficulty with that concept is that it provides a floor in terms of a regular tuition hike but not a ceiling,” she said.
NYPIRG has an ally in its anti-hike stance in Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco, R-Schenectady. Tedisco put out a news release today saying he is against both the SUNY plan and the proposed toll increase on the New York State Thruway.
“Hiking Thruway tolls, raising SUNY tuition, having Upstate continually mired in serious job and population losses, it’s beginning to look like the ‘Perfect Financial Storm’ is brewing for hard-working New Yorkers,” he said in a statement today.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer will consider SUNY’s budget proposal as he compiles his budget recommendation for 2008-09, which will be released in late January. Lawmakers have until April 1 to pass a spending plan.
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on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 7:06 pm by Cara Matthews.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
