Excel-si-oops

It looks like thousands of New York students who qualify for Gov. Cuomo’s Excelsior Scholarship will actually wind up paying higher tuition this year. Guess that “appeal to Bernie Sanders voters” stuff is harder than it looks.

The Excelsior grants aim to make public colleges tuition-free for students whose families make $100,000 or less a year (and under $125,000 by 2019). But, for obvious reasons, they won’t go to those who already pay no tuition thanks to other grants — which is actually most of those who’d qualify.

Thing is, the SUNY Board of Trustees over the summer quietly voted to raise tuition by $200 for all students who don’t get Excelsior help.

As the Albany Student Press reports, fewer than 900 of the 13,000-plus students at SUNY’s U Albany are set to receive the new scholarship. That leaves about 94 percent of the kids paying more — including many with family incomes below Cuomo’s cutoff who’ll have that much less left from their aid package to cover non-tuition expenses. And similar math will apply at every other SUNY campus.

This is the plan Sanders lauded as a “revolutionary idea” that will “reverberate not only throughout the state of New York, but throughout this country.”

Well, maybe not in quite the way that Cuomo planned.

That $200 hike is the most the board can inflict in a single year, and only by declaring an emergency — in this case, because of rising costs. Maybe the governor needs to focus more on SUNY’s overall finances and less on delivering Bernie’s “free college” dream?