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Testimony at City Council Hearing of Higher
Education Committee: “Rising Tuition Costs at the CUNY
Community Colleges”
Thursday,
June 12, 2003 at 10 A.M.
by Jane J.
Young Prof. of English, Chair of PSC Chapter, BMCC
Good morning. My name is Jane Young, and I’m a Professor of English
and Chair of the PSC Chapter at the Borough of Manhattan Community
College. I’m here today on behalf of both our students and members
of our faculty who care passionately about their fates — and that’s
almost every one of us — to urge the members of this committee, and
the City Council as a whole, to prevent, in whatever ways possible,
the raising of CUNY community college tuition by $300 in the Fall of
2003.
By blocking the raising of tuition at CUNY community colleges, which
are already the fifth most expensive in the country and whose
tuition dwarfs that of the California community colleges, which
charge just over $300 a year, you will forestall the10% drop in
enrollment projected by the chancellor’s office in the wake of such
increases at both community colleges and senior colleges. You will
keep BMCC students. 71% of whom come from households earning under
$25,000, 47% from households earning under $15,000, and nearly half
of whom work, from either having to drop out or attend part-time and
thus become ineligible for TAP assistance. You will preserve the
historic mission of CUNY, which in 1847 was a Free Academy and which
until 1976, after the advent of open admissions, had no tuition at
all.
I know firsthand about the miracle of no tuition, because I
graduated from City College in 1962, and if the school hadn’t been
free, I would not have been able to go there, since my father had
died an untimely death, and there was no money available. Everybody
gives lip service to CUNY’s mission to educate those who might
otherwise not be able to afford higher education, but we in the
community colleges take it very seriously because our students are
living embodiments of the American dream and because CUNY community
colleges are the only way for them to realize it and to receive a
quality education that prepares them for career mobility, not mere
vocational training that goes nowhere.
The State Legislature has put us all — faculty and students —in a
terrible bind. By creating a $120 million gap in funding the senior
colleges, the Legislature has forced the university not only to
raise tuition for in-state undergraduate students by $800, as well
as mandating major hikes in tuition at the law school and for
graduate students, and obscene 50% hikes in the tuition for
out-of-state, principally international students, but has also
cruelly and cynically set faculty and students against one another
by encouraging the CUNY central administration to use tuition
increases as a way of hiring new full-time faculty.
Currently, the community colleges are staffed by 40% full-timers;
the CUNY master plan calls for staffing by 70% full-time faculty.
That’s a huge gap., fillable only by hiring 750 new full-time
faculty members. Raising tuition, we are being told, is the only way
to hire more full-time teachers to begin — only begin — to close the
gap. Also implied is that our 60% adjunct faculty have not been
adequately preparing our students to meet the lofty requirements and
standards for transfer to senior colleges, and that only by hiring
full-time faculty will be providing our students with a first-rate
education. While I and all of my colleagues wholeheartedly support
hiring many more new full-time teachers, I would remind the Higher
Education committee that BMCC recently had the highest percentage of
total students passing the CPE in the entire university .— so we
can’t have been doing such a poor job all along; indeed, many of our
adjuncts are truly outstanding.
Whatever we are being told about the reasons for raising the tuition
of the community colleges, the truth appears to be that the raise is
being sought to make sure that students won’t avoid the senior
colleges for the first two years and flock to the more economical
community colleges, since there will be a $1500 gap in tuition,
instead of the $700 gap there is now. I learned recently that the
large majority of senior college students who actually graduate are
already transfer students to begin with; it seems that the central
administration wants more students to start and finish at senior
colleges, not to transfer into them, as they do now. The
Chancellor’s rather sudden and passionate desire to hire full-time
faculty, after years of hardly authorizing the hiring of any, masks
other less noble motives.
The bottom line is that a raise of $300 in community college tuition
is not needed or required in terms of the community colleges’ budget
for the following year, it won’t make life any easier for the senior
and comprehensive colleges, it won’t solve the basic problem of the
outrageous and continued underfunding of CUNY by the New York state
legislature or the 33% inflation-based decrease in contribution to
City University’s budget by the city since 1990, and it won’t stop
the tidal wave of pressure to turn public institutions into private
ones by increasing the percentage of tuition as basic funding for
the university over the 50% mark, which is rapidly happening at City
University — we only have 9% to go. What it will do is increase the
already heavy burden of tuition for our community college students
who are barely able to pay for their education now — and many of
whom, regrettably, are no longer eligible for financial aid of any
kind.
Do we want the best education possible for our students? Of course
we do — but in order for us to teach them, they must be able to get
in the door. The last time tuition was raised at City University, in
1995, we lost nearly 10,000 students — and that was during some good
years in the economy. Now, with the unemployment rate in New York
City at 8% and rising, our students more than ever need and want to
be in college. As chair of the Professional Staff Congress chapter
at BMCC, and on behalf of my dedicated colleagues, I am asking the
members of the Higher Education Committee to safeguard the future of
our students and of the historical mission of our university and
keep the wolves from our doors. Say no to a $300 tuition increase.
Thank you very much.
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