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HEARING ON TUITION INCREASES
CITY COUNCIL / COMMITTEE ON HIGHER EDUCATION
JANUARY 31, 2003

TESTIMONY: LENORE BEAKY, LAGUARDIA CC

Good afternoon.  I teach English literature and composition at LaGuardia
Community College, and I am a member of the University Faculty Senate, the UFS Community College Caucus, the Community College Conference, and a representative of the English Department in LaGuardia Community College's Faculty Council.  (The UFS has not yet discussed the issue of tuition.)  Thank you very much for this opportunity to testify against further increases in CUNY tuition, and in favor of Resolution 585.

I graduated from Brooklyn College in 1967.  There was no tuition.  In fact,
my mother moved us from Pennsylvania to New York after I graduated from junior high school because she knew that CUNY was tuition-free and I would have had no other opportunity to attend college. Student fees were something like $20 a semester.  I lived at home and my mother cooked my meals.  I worked only during the summers.  Of course I made exactly $45 a week after taxes at that summer job, but you get the idea-it was a different world.  Today, my CUNY community college students pay nearly twice what I paid in 1970 for a full year's residence unit in the Ph.D. program at Columbia University-they pay $2500 a year; I paid $1400. Should the $1200 increase be applied to community colleges, that would be a 50% increase.

Your resolution covers practically all the bases: that higher education is
essential to the well-being of the students who pursue it, that these
students bear more of the burden of their education than even 10 years ago, let alone longer than that, that CUNY's senior colleges are the fourteenth most expensive in the nation, and the community colleges are the fifth most expensive [they used to be the second most expensive-have they been passed?], that tuition has rocketed while city and state support have sunk, that New York State is third worst in its support of higher education, that the numbers of full-time faculty have plummeted just since 1990 (let alone since 1975), that enrollment dropped by 29,000 after the last tuition increase in 1995, representing a loss of income for the university.  After all that, what else is there to say?  Well, a few things.

Our CUNY students, especially those at community colleges (which are
primarily supported by the city), are disproportionately poor, persons of
color, women, working, raising families, immigrants.  More than half of them receive no TAP or any other financial aid-too rich, apparently.  But higher education transforms them into productive, taxpaying citizens, members of the New York City workforce and economic base.

However, we are being told that there is no money, the same song that was sung during the 1990's, the years of great surpluses and rolling wealth.  But that wealth stayed in the private sector and was augmented by tax cuts, more tax cuts, and still more tax cuts. Now, when the surpluses have run out, we have-more tax cuts!  Yet, according to the Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in a 2002 report, New York State received a big fat F for "affordability" of higher education.

Orwellian language comes from the governor:  "New York State continues to demonstrate national leadership in providing support for higher education," he says in his budget message. (Is this "leadership" a race to the bottom?)  He proposes to cut state support for senior colleges by 12%, and to cut community college base aid support by 15%; CUNY trustees will be permitted, not only to raise tuition, but also to establish differential tuition and annual tuition increases.  And under the enticing heading, "New Incentives for College Completion," the governor proposes once again to withhold one-third of all TAP awards for those students lucky enough to receive TAP in the first place. The confiscated TAP awards will be forked over to those students able to graduate within 2 or 4 years-loans can tide them over in the meantime. (And tuition "indexing" will function to reduce protests and awareness that tuition is in fact increasing, much as has happened with fees, now up to $800 a year.)

The governor doesn't want "job-killing tax increases." So he won't support a progressive commuter tax, certainly not an increase in the state income tax.   Instead, we will have regressive taxes: property taxes, restored sales taxes, fees and more fees, transit hikes, higher tuition and less TAP.  And the governor will go off to Washington, he hopes, as the tax cutter of all time, having defunded the public sector and leaving the rest of us to clean up the messes, as Fitzgerald once said in The Great Gatsby.

Well, this is nothing new for CUNY.  The CUNY Budget Office has documented the degree to which state and city support has shrunk since 1991 while tuition has doubled.  CUNY has also documented that the numbers of full-time faculty, now around 5000, have declined from 6500 in 1990, but shockingly, from 11,000 in 1975. Those faculty were replaced by academic piece workers, the exploited class we know as adjuncts.  Even Mayor Giuliani's own 1999 Task Force documented the same historic underfunding of CUNY and overreliance on tuition, and their consequences.

At LaGuardia, we studied which students left the college without completing a degree, and why they left.  What were the most frequently cited reasons?  Surprise: prohibitively-high tuition and fees, and the appearance of unexpected expenses.  Also a factor, health-related problems, the students' own or those of a family member, and conflicts between jobs and school. But all is not lost-our students' dividends will no longer be taxed!