Wednesday, April 24, 2024 | St. Lawrence County, NY
A vast majority of North Country families with college age children would be eligible for free SUNY tuition under the Excelsior Scholarship program. According to numbers from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s …
This item is available in full to subscribers.
To continue reading, you will need to either log in to your subscriber account, or purchase a new subscription.
If you are a digital subscriber with an active, online-only subscription then you already have an account here. Just reset your password if you've not yet logged in to your account on this new site.
Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing.
Please log in to continue |
A vast majority of North Country families with college age children would be eligible for free SUNY tuition under the Excelsior Scholarship program.
According to numbers from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office, 84.8 percent of the North Country’s 18,542 families with college-age children would qualify.
That’s the highest regional percentage in New York, tied with the Mohawk Valley.
program requires participating students to be enrolled at a SUNY or CUNY two- or four-year college full-time. The initiative will cover middle class families and individuals making up to $125,000 through a supplemental aid program.
The new initiative will be phased in over three years, beginning for New Yorkers making up to $100,000 annually in the fall of 2017, increasing to $110,000 in 2018, and reaching $125,000 in 2019.
Based on enrollment projections, the plan is expected to cost approximately $163 million per year once fully phased in. While the cost estimate of the program is low, that is because it works with already existing programs to close the “last mile” of tuition costs. It combines New York’s $1 billion Tuition Assistance Program with federal grant funding, and then fills in any remaining gaps.
“The governor’s program also works by incentivizing students to graduate on-time, requiring students to attend college full-time and graduate with an associate’s degree in two years or a bachelor’s degree in four years. Graduation rates at New York’s public colleges, while similar to other schools nationwide, are too low – 61 percent of four-year students and 91 percent of our two-year community college students in New York don’t complete their degrees on time,” according to a news release from Cuomo’s office. “The Excelsior scholarship aims to change that, saving students time and money by reducing their overall debt burden. The plan also recognizes there may be circumstances outside students control, which is why the proposal includes a ‘stepping out’ provision so that students will be able to pause and restart the program if life gets in the way.”
