SUNY not cheap as advertised

I am writing in regards to the April 6th editorial "A reasonable delay." The author of this editorial advocates fair, incremental, and predictable tuition increases; while I agree with this position, I take issue with several of the points raised, as they misrepresented the political and economic climate of New York with regard to higher education.

The editorial claims that New York state university students enjoy "some of the cheapest tuition in the country." This simply is untrue. Studies by the New York Public Interest Research Group indicate that over the last ten years state funding of higher education has decreased by 3.2 percent, while tuition has increased to the order of 29 percent. These parallel policies of decreasing state funding, while consistently hiking tuition have resulted in New York having some of the most expensive public higher education in the country; SUNY ranks 20th in the nation, CUNY ranks 3rd. This is the true political climate of New York.

The Senate's indexing policy, while it certainly would contribute to a greater degree of accountability in the SUNY system, would only serve to perpetuate a political climate of hiking our tuition into the stratosphere. The tuition indexing plan also contains the caveat of being inexorably tied to the rising operational costs of the SUNY system; tuition could still be subject to arbitrary rises as the SUNY administration deems necessary. NYPIRG concludes that this plan does not implement a "ceiling" for tuition, but rather a tuition "floor."

I don't pretend to speak for the New York State Assembly. However, I feel the assembly is correct in its opinion that there has not yet been an equitable tuition policy brought to the table.