Audit: Undercharging at SUNY

Lax policies allowed out-of-state residents to get in-state discount by checking a box

Many out-of-state residents appear to have gotten discounted in-state SUNY tuition due to lax policies, an audit found.

The comptroller’s office audited seven SUNY schools for the period between June 2015 and September 2019 to determine if they were correctly charging out-of-state tuition to graduate students who have a permanent address in another state. The tuition difference is significant: It costs about $10,000 more for undergraduate studies, on average, and typically $12,000 more for graduate school.

But students could get the discounted price simply by checking a box to attest that they were in-state residents without having to prove it, said the audit, which was released Thursday.

About half of undergraduates’ addresses are confirmed by a central office. But the other half must be confirmed by the specific SUNY school. The schools must also individually confirm each graduate student’s address.

Generally, students must prove they have lived in New York for the previous 12 months. Attending school in the state doesn’t count on its own.

But some schools were “simply accepting what the student listed for residence on their application” and other administrators said they didn’t know the residency policy applied to graduate students, the audit found.

Auditors randomly sampled 1,207 graduate student applications and found that 35 percent of them included little or no proof of address. If all of them actually lived out of state, the SUNY schools lost $1.3 million in tuition, the audit said. And if the 35 percent without proof of address holds true throughout all SUNY schools, up to 52,000 graduate school students might not have had to prove their address to get the discounted tuition.

The audit said the problem was most pronounced among the campuses studied at the University at Buffalo, Binghamton University, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and SUNY at Geneseo — “with Buffalo having little or no documented support for graduate students’ residency in more than half the applications sampled.”

Auditors also found that several students were overcharged when they were in-state residents, for a total overcharge of $44,000.

“SUNY is enabling graduate students from out of state to take advantage of a tuition benefit that is supposed to be reserved for New Yorkers,” said Comptroller Thomas P. Dinapoli. “SUNY’S medical schools and other graduate programs are highly competitive and represent an excellent value, regardless of residency status. SUNY administrators and staff need to ensure that tuition is charged correctly for both in-state and out-of-state students.”

Auditors cited many cases in which it would have been easy

SUNY is enabling graduate students from out-of-state to take advantage of a tuition benefit that is supposed to be reserved for New Yorkers.”

— Comptroller Thomas P. Dinapoli

to determine the student’s address.

In one case, a SUNY school sent the in-state tuition bill to an address in Maryland, auditors said.

In another case, an application for medical school clearly showed that the student was not a New York resident, yet the person got the discounted rate anyway.

“All information on the application was out-of-state. The student indicated a permanent address in another state and graduated from a high school in that state. Additionally, all prior colleges attended by the student were in other states,” the comptroller’s office wrote in the audit.

In some cases students even volunteered that they lived in another state, but still got the discount. One student had lived in New York as a high school and undergraduate student, and attended SUNY Cortland with the correctly applied in-state tuition.

“However, on their graduate application this student listed another state as their permanent and mailing address and answered ‘No’ to the state residency question. Therefore, the student was not a state resident at the time of graduate admission and should not have been assessed an in-state tuition rate,” the auditors wrote.

In a response to the audit, SUNY officials noted the analysis included only graduate students, who are about 12 percent of the total student population, and said it’s possible many of the students are in-state residents who just didn’t provide the right documentation. However, officials are clarifying the residency policy with school administrators to ensure documentation is checked in the future.