America's public school system used to be the envy of the world. American higher education still is. In our typically American way, we constantly criticize our colleges and universities -- and that's healthy when it's intended to improve them to achieve our ideals. But foreign experts continue to marvel at our higher education system, especially our public institutions, for its provision of both equal opportunity and excellence and contribution to national prosperity. As the rector of a Soviet state university recently observed, "American universities are not good because the United States is rich. America is rich because it has good universities" (New York Times, 3/15/89).
The premier standing of American higher education is now in jeopardy because many governors across the country, unlike the Soviet rector, aren't distinguishing between an expense and an investment and are readying to slash budgets. It's time for a crash course in Economics I before we sacrifice the higher education opportunities of hundreds of thousands of Americans - and, with them, a key component of individual, state and national prosperity.
Public higher education is on the line across the nation, but nowhere is this threat more apparent than in New York State. New York runs one of the top public higher education systems in the world, the State University of New York (SUNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY). Between them, they enroll almost 600,000 students. Between them, they have produced scores of distinguished graduates, men and women who would not have been able to enroll in higher education without this public system and who have geometrically paid back the public investment made in them by enriching the economic and cultural life of our nation. SUNY and CUNY are also credited for a large part ofNew York's economic recovery in the last few years. And now SUNY and CUNY are slated for a devastating $115 million cut in Governor Cuomo's proposed state budget for next year.
CUNY, which would lose about $45 million needed to maintain even its current offerings, is already reeling from reductions imposed earlier this year. Hundred of classes have been canceled for its more than 188,000 students, many of whom will not be able to take courses required to advance and complete their degrees. Classes are severely over-crowded, physical plants are deteriorating and technical equipment is idle for lack of repair. In close to 50% of all classes, part-timers have replaced full-time professors and many students get little attention. While legislators have been talking about ways to increase minority college enrollment and retention, CUNY has been producing more minority graduates than any other postsecondary institution in the country. Now minority and other CUNY students face an end to their college dreams or a further assault on the quality of their education.
SUNY, which is slated for $70 million in cuts, is already operating with an enrollment cap based not on student quality or on space but on an already strained budget. Despite a decline in the number of high school graduates, SUNY has experienced an increase in the number of quality of applicants. Over 4 7% of the state's high school graduates apply to SUNY, yet SUNY can admit only 57% of those eligible, a smaller proportion than the state's private institutions. Many of the qualified applicants SUNY is turning away cannot afford to go elsewhere. Those who do get in are finding themselves with limited access to libraries and to professors, New York Times -March 26, 1989 whose ranks are fewer than they were a decade ago. To absorb the shock of the proposed budget cut, SUNY is considering a tuition increase, which will further cut off access for qualified students.
Why is this happening? Are the SUNY and CUNY systems inefficient, overrun with faculty and student amenities and with expensive ivy? Hardly. SUNY, for example, spends $943 less per year to educate a student than comparable public institutions and $1, 128 less than its private counterparts in the state. Has the demand or need for access to quality education decreased? Quite the contrary. Are SUNY and CUNY failing to fulfill their mission? No -- not yet. So why are they being punished?
The simple, and embarrassing, answer is that the state overestimated its tax revenues by about $2 billion and has to "make up" the shortfall. In the Governor's proposed budget, that means cutting funds for most state agencies. So sharp is the knife that, at a time when the public's concern about crime is at a fever pitch, even teachers and vocational educators in the state's prisons and juvenile facilities are slated for layoffs, thereby further reducing the chances that paroled criminals return to our streets rehabilitated.
What makes these threats to New York's public institutions and to its citizens so extraordinary is not their necessity but their lack of necessity. The money is there -- in the income-tax cut that was adopted in the state years earlier and that the Governor's proposed budget is bent on implementing. The $2 billion of tax revenues the planners of yesteryear estimated for today didn't turn out to be real, and the tax cut they planned because of it is not real yet. What is real is a higher education system facing devastation, a citizenry who is eager for college opportunities and a state and nation in desperate need of talent. It is time for the Governor's proposed budget to get real, too.
It is ironic that one year after the Governor declared New York's Decade of the Child, hundreds of thousands of children are facing the foreclosure of their college opportunities while tens of thousands of young adults who have reached the college door may now be dumped. The children may now turn to other dreams ... perhaps of drugs and crime. The young adults will grow cynical about the American dream of equal access to higher education, a dream that SUNY and CUNY have been realizing for them and for the larger community.
SUNY and CUNY deserve better, and so does New York. The price the state will pay for the promise of a tax cut is a nightmare.