Stay a little or pay a little

Opponents of Gov. Cuomo’s landmark plan to provide free CUNY and SUNY tuition to young people from New York families making less than $125,000 are seizing on a late-addition residency requirement to claim the program would be all-controlling socialism run amok.

Don’t be ridiculous. All the Excelsior Scholarship asks is that students stay in state for as many years as they got the taxpayer-funded benefit.

If a SUNY grad gets a great first job on the West Coast and wants to take it, bless his or her heart; it just means paying back, over time, the portion of the money the public ponied up for the free ride.

For lower-income kids, who get most of their help via the Tuition Assistance Program, the potential clawback amount would be minimal. For kids a bit higher up the income ladder, who will get the most out of Excelsior, it’ll be more.

Don’t weep for them. The exact same types of rules apply to other higher education tuition help the state provides, like the state’s Science, Technology and Math scholarships, and one that aims to get top talent to teach in the state’s schools.

And it makes sense: Just as there are rules to ensure that families really live here before qualifying, asking young people to stay here for a set period of time helps ensure that New York, with limited tax dollars, isn’t boosting the economies of competing states.

There are a few real downside risks here. Nobody should want recent grads in economically depressed parts of the state to have an economic incentive to take root on mom and dad’s couch — or mow lawns — rather than strike out and go to Boston or Denver to better themselves.

Or for SUNY and CUNY grads who just can’t afford city rents and settle across the river in Jersey (we hear the train commute is smooth and easy) to unfairly sustain a big economic hit.

Cuomo’s team insists that exemptions written into regulations will minimize such perverse unintended consequences — as will exceptions for students who want to go into the military, or the Peace Corps, or to grad school.

You can’t blame critics for being surprised by the big new asterisk, which popped up after passage of the budget. For weeks, Cuomo had been selling free tuition. Staying in state or getting your gift clawed back never came up.

Now, too late, we know about the idea. It’s a fine one.