State must restore meaningful funding to SUNY system
New Yorkers are paying unprecedented tuition and fees to go to college and yet the State University of New York is dying. Why? In the wake of the Great Recession, state government slashed education budgets while raising tuition and never stopped.
The state used to meet individual tuition costs dollar for dollar. Now you pay $2.50 for every dollar the state kicks in. Tuition is far from the end of families’ financial burden. Fees and meal plans get more expensive every year.
The COVID -19 pandemic has turned this untenable situation into a full-blown budget catastrophe. SUNY faces revenue losses between $800 million to $1 billion for the 2020-21 academic year. The University at Albany has announced a budget shortfall of $59 million, all because students are not living and eating on campus.
In the absence of meaningful state aid, SUNY schools have been forced to push for in-person classes — in the midst of a global pandemic — in order to fill the dorm rooms. Make no mistake, faculty want to be back in the classroom with their students as soon as it is safe. In-person education is still the best way to provide engaging lessons and foster a spirit of intellectual curiosity. And we know better than anyone else that our students miss each other and the community they have built. But right now it is not safe and we shouldn’t be
filling dorm beds in a vain attempt to sustain a failed business model.
Our university system was barely making ends meet before the pandemic; now it faces an existential threat. There is nothing left to cut. Tuition and fees are already too high and wages are too low.
Nearly half of the teaching faculty at Ualbany — 47 percent — work with no job security and make as little as $16,000 a year. System-wide, three in five academics work contract to contract with no expectation that they will have a job the following semester. Many of them rely on public assistance to make ends meet. Parents are sinking into debt to pay for a university system that fails to provide a living wage for nearly half of its instructors.
There is really only one solution to this problem: We need to raise revenue so that the state can fully fund the SUNY system. And there are readily available sources of this tax revenue. Our union has joined a coalition of other unions, state legislators and community groups to reinstate the stock transfer tax. Since 1981, money collected from this tax has been refunded, dollar for dollar, back to the stockbrokers who pay it. If the state kept that revenue, it could generate, by some estimates, up to $13 billion a year.
The wealth of the 643 billionaires in the United States grew by $845 billion during the first six months of the pandemic. There are no excuses to delay and every reason to act now. The Legislature needs to secure the revenue we need to fully fund our SUNY system and support good-paying, dignified jobs that educate our youth and prepare them to take on the future’s many challenges.