Cuomo’s very good college investment

The growing national movement to make college more affordable got a real boost when Gov. Cuomo unveiled a plan to make SUNY and CUNY tuition-free for thousands of New Yorkers. His proposal, which would zero out tuition for all families making under $125,000, is good news for those struggling to afford higher education.

The Legislature should approve it — especially because recent data demonstrate that New York’s public colleges are doing an especially strong job of helping New York families from the lower rungs of the economic ladder enter the middle class.

In a study released last month, Stanford economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues looked at colleges and universities across the nation to see which ones do the best job of admitting lower-income students and then helping those students graduate into meaningful middle-class jobs.

The results were striking, and very good news for SUNY and CUNY. Both systems do an exceptionally good job of providing gateways for New Yorkers into the middle class: They are more likely to enroll lower-income students than other universities and, importantly, far more likely than other schools to graduate their students into the middle class.

The fact that New York’s public universities are engines of social mobility means that taxpayers will be getting a strong return on investment when they assist hardworking kids to attend these schools. If you believe that government should be providing a hand up — rather than a handout — this is precisely the kind of assistance you should be supporting.

But in order for our state schools to continue serving lowerand middle-income students so successfully, we must also ensure a continued commitment to them.

First, leaders should adequately fund CUNY and SUNY in the years ahead. At a time when public colleges and universities across the country are seeing their budgets slashed, New York has the chance to push against this troubling tide and set a clear example of the kind of values states should be standing for.

Albany has done a good job of ensuring funding to SUNY in the last decade, but the state contribution to CUNY could stand a significant boost. Since 2010, state expenditures to SUNY have increased nearly 30% while state contributions to CUNY have stagnated. At the same time, the percentage of low-income students at CUNY has fallen slightly in recent years.

We must not allow budgetary pressures to diminish the ability of CUNY to help lower-income, disproportionately immigrant students to flourish and succeed.

Second, we should build on the quality of the SUNY system as a whole to build up one of the individual schools as a flagship that could rival UC-Berkeley in quality and excellence.

The U.S News & World Report rankings of public universities in the United States put our best SUNY school — Binghamton — only 36th among public universities. Twenty-two states have higher-ranked public universities than New York. We can do better, and we should.

Why does it matter? One area where Berkeley distinguished itself in Chetty’s research was the ability to launch low-income students into the very upper echelons of American society. Almost 9% of Berkeley students from households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution ended up with incomes in the top 1%.

The figures for CUNY and SUNY were 0.5% and 1% respectively. A flagship school in New York could be a hub for research and economic growth and, like Berkeley, a means of molding future leaders across a variety of fields.

So even as we work to ensure that SUNY and CUNY maintain their strong track records of social mobility, we must look for opportunities to capitalize where there is still room for growth and improvement.

Free tuition will help many students go to college; we must ensure that the colleges they attend provide them with a quality education. Greater access and excellence should be seen as complementary, not conflicting, public goals.

Cuomo has taken a crucial step in making sure that college is affordable for all New Yorkers. Now, we need to ensure that the institutions these students are attending live up to their full potential.