What a surprise, Andrew Cuomo’s free tuition at state schools program does not apply to over 2/3 of applicants:
After New York officials announced a plan to pay college tuition for middle-class students last year, Domonique Baker was pretty sure she would qualify for the money.
“When I first heard about the scholarship, I read everything,” the now 27-year-old hospital registration representative said. Through her research, Baker learned that she met what she thought were the major requirements: Her annual income was below the $110,000 maximum and she was pursuing a bachelor’s degree at one of New York’s public universities, SUNY-New Paltz. Baker filled out the application and waited to hear back, calling multiple times to check up on her status.
Shortly before she was set to start her last year of classes, Baker said learned she didn’t qualify for the Excelsior Scholarship, as it’s known, because she was attending school part-time, balancing her schedule with a full-time job working overnights at a hospital. “It was marketed to middle-class families and working families and, unfortunately, everybody’s reality is different,” Baker said, adding that hers includes a full-time job.
Just over 20,000 students received the Excelsior Scholarship last year or about 3.2% of the state’s 633,543 undergraduates during the 2017-2018 academic year, according to an analysis of New York State higher education data released last week by the Center for an Urban Future, a New York City-based think tank focused on economic equity.
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Perhaps more telling of Excelsior’s challenges than the relatively low number of students receiving the scholarship is the number of students who were rejected. Of the 63,599 students who applied, 43,513 were denied or about 68%, Hilliard’s report found.
Those findings don’t jibe with numbers from the governor’s office, which found that roughly 95,000 students applied for the scholarship and between 22,000 and 23,000 ended receiving it.
Actually, they do: Both have a rejection rate of over 2/3.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Rat Faced Andy does not want to help the poor and middle class, and an even less educated populace, which might see through the bullsh%$ that he is serving up as meaningful government action.
He wanted credit for a political moment while creating a program that is small enough, and cruel enough, that he can kill it at a later date, because it does not help his rich donors.
FWIW, I did not coin the term “Rat Faced Andy”. Spy magazine, the same rag that coined the term, “Short Fingered Vulgarian,” to describe Trump, did.
Source passes along this paragraph from a book on Spy magazine, that’s another entry in the history of @realDonaldTrump and @andrewcuomo https://t.co/dBQ6R6zmKN pic.twitter.com/UuVva02jIy— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) August 26, 2018