Inside the Current Issue

18% Tuition Hike Slams CUNY Graduate Students

James Hoff

GC students stand in protest of the Board of Trustees tuition vote

As if New York City was not already expensive enough, Graduate Center students are arriving on campus only to find that their tuition has miraculously increased over the summer by more than 18%. On June 27th the CUNY Board of Trustees, in a near-unanimous decision, voted to approve a revised schedule of tuition and fees for all new and returning senior college graduate and Graduate Center students. Of the 16 board members with voting privileges (10 gubernatorial appointees, 5 mayoral appointees and one student-appointed representative) only the student representative, undergraduate Lauren Fasano, opposed the new tuition schedule. She held that the increases would unduly strain already overburdened graduate students, and that the university should seek more state funding rather than simply increasing tuition.

The new fee schedule, which went into effect for the Fall semester, significantly increases Masters and PhD tuition at all of the university's main campuses including Hunter, City College, Lehman, Baruch, and the Graduate Center, where in-state tuition for Level I PhD students has now increased from $4,825 to $5,720 per year. Increases at other levels were comparable, while some senior college departments faced even larger increases in specialized programs.

In a statement provided to the university community on the day of the vote, the Board of Trustees cited budget deficiencies for senior colleges totaling $36.3 million as the main reason for the increases. The Board claimed that these shortfalls were the result of "a $22.2 million reduction in state operating aid, and $14 million in increased obligations and needs" which included faculty commitments, facility needs, environmental health and safety compliance, new building costs at Medgar Evers College and a small portion, reportedly $300,000, for investments in graduate fellowships.

The Board of Trustees also argued in its statement that the budget shortfalls would be met, by, among other things, "increased revenue from enrollment growth for new freshmen and increased retention of all classes of students at all of the senior colleges." The Graduate tuition increases were supported by the City College Department of Engineering and the former Graduate Center President Frances Degen Horowitz, among others.

However, Hunter Professor of Public Health Nicholas Freudenberg disagreed. In a statement to the Board on June 20th (before the final vote on the 27th) he argued that the new tuition schedule, rather than increasing retention and school income, will in fact decrease the total number of graduate students in some programs, and thus the total amount of university revenue. According to Freudenberg, the Hunter College Program in Urban Public Health surveyed its graduate students during the week of May 16th¬20th and found that "for a 20 percent tuition increase (the closest to the increase actually proposed by CUNY), 29 percent of students returning in Fall 2005 reported they would take fewer courses and 13 percent reported that would drop out." Freudenberg also concluded that the tuition increases would disproportionately effect students who are poor and people of color, many of whom are already struggling to pay for their education. The conclusion was that "if students reduced their course load as they reported in the survey, the new tuition would lead to a 9 percent decrease in tuition revenue" for the Public Health program at Hunter, one of the largest in the region.

The PSC also held a protest inside the Board of Trustees meeting, asking for a new contract.

Freudenberg is not the only member of the university community to come out strongly against the tuition increases. Over 60 faculty members, including City College Professor Bill Crain, an active and outspoken member of the University Faculty Senate, signed a letter in opposition to the increases. David Hamilton Golland, Doctoral Students' Council Co-Chair for Communications (and the University Student Senate's Vice Chair for Graduate Affairs) also came out against the tuition increases. He was largely responsible for organizing a small but noticeable contingent of student protesters (including this reporter), dressed in red, who stood in silent (and not so silent) opposition as the Board of Trustees offered its vote on June 27th.

For Golland, like many others opposed to the new schedule, tuition increases for undergraduate as well as graduate students are simply an unequivocal affront to CUNY's historic mission to provide affordableÜformerly freeÜeducation to the people of New York City. In fact, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein himself graduated from City College when CUNY was still free. The Board of Trustees, on the other hand, has argued that graduate tuition rates at CUNY colleges are still lower than most comparable programs in the Northeast.

Golland and others, however, are concerned that the Board of Trustees spent such a short amount of time drafting its new business plan and response to the budget deficit. When asked about whether there were other available options besides a tuition increase, Golland slammed the Board of Trustees, saying "a better question would be why the Vice Chancellor's office was able to come up with this plan in only six weeks when they take years to solve what should seem more mundane problems, like the funding of the university's wellness centers and the provision of adequate student health insurance. The bottom line is that there were other possibilities, but the administration took the easiest route and, as it turned out, the path of least resistance."

James Hoff is a PhD student in the English program.