The State of New York's Two Public Universities are on Hard Times. (October 10, 2005)

    At a hearing this past Friday at the City University of New York Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan sponsored by the higher education committees of the State Senate and Assembly, Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty and staff union at CUNY told the hearing, "We have reached the point of crisis; students are paying almost 50 percent of the operating costs [while] professors have not had a raise in four years. Our salaries are not keeping pace. And we can't recruit new faculty."

 The New York Times reports that according to state data, students at CUNY's four-year colleges paid less than US$1,500 (~17%) in tuition and fees in 1990, while the state provided US$7,023 per student. In 2003, tuition and fees had risen to US$4,300 (42%) while the state subsidy per student had fallen to US$5,846.

CUNY has more than 200,000 students on 20 campuses, and the State University of New York (SUNY) has more than 400,000 students on 64 campuses.

The NYT goes on to say, "Speaking at a hearing at the State University at Stony Brook, [acting chancellor, John R. Ryan] said that enrollment of first-time, full-time freshmen at SUNY's community colleges had increased 30 percent in the past five years, while enrollment at the four-year campuses had been flat, 'primarily due to enrollment growth funding limits,'" while Matthew Goldstein, CUNY's chancellor, told Friday's hearing at CYNY that since 1990, state appropriations for the university had declined by about a third. He warned that the state was "slipping mightily" in its ability to prepare workers.

Although various proposals to remedy the proposals were put forward by university administrations, and students, the members of the New York State higher education committees while polite remained uncommitted as regarded and proposals that might be put forward at the state governmental level.

Of course the state of New York is not running anything like a budget surplus.