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CUNY plans to raise tuition again by $300 per year, which is cost prohibitive for CUNY’s student body. Nearly 75 percent of CUNY’s student population are people of color. More than half of the CUNY student body come from households making less than $30,000 per year. Many live in shelters and need food stamps.

NYS politicians deem the tuition hikes to be a successful revenue stream, notwithstanding budgets cuts for programs like SEEK and the disproportionate impact such hikes will have on poor students of color, almost half of which are first generation college students.

From the NYC Gotham Gazette:

“Yeah, I know a few,” said Louis Di Meglio, a former undergraduate and now graduate student at Brooklyn College. Without much pause he began talking about a fraternity brother who may need to drop out next year and another friend who had to delay her graduation because it was, as Di Meglio put it, “between her tuition and her brother’s.”

He spoke casually, and with graduation rates under 50 percent for most schools in the City University of New York, dropping out is common.

[…]

“I have students, some of whom are living in shelters, who qualify for food stamps,” said Francesco Crocco, an assistant professor of English at BMCC. “We’re throwing the burden of public education on the people who are least able to pay.”

Students who come from low-income families incur a significant amount of student debt with the hope of graduating and becoming gainfully employed in their chosen profession. Yet, income has not kept pace with educational debt. To make matters worse, not only do women with a PhD makes as much as men with a BA degree, but the racial wealth gap also continues to widen astronomically.

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