Mr. Cuomo’s Free* College Plan
It’s not as if free tuition for the middle class was a dream that has been burning in the governor’s heart since he was growing up in middle-class Queens. It was, as he said on Wednesday, a bolt of insight from watching the presidential race.
This was not the product of extensive hearings or long study; there was no sense that it emerged because public-policy or higher-education experts
.. let’s examine what is keeping young New Yorkers out of college, and figure out how to get them in and keep them there.
.. It is not for part-time students, a huge portion of the community-college population.
.. It’s not for poor families
.. even though the cost of room and board and books is what’s keeping many poor students out of college, the Excelsior Scholarship covers none of that.
.. Mr. Cuomo is now free to let others sort out the perplexing details while he moves on.
.. it seemed to him that Mr. Cuomo had “hastily reverse-engineered” the process to get the headline he wanted, which sounds about right.