The folks at CUNY Rising Alliance are asking that as many people as possible write to their New York State legislators and urge them to support a #NewDealforCUNY. What’s that?

The proposed legislation, New Deal for CUNY (A5843/S4461), is in the next state budget.

The New Deal for CUNY would make CUNY tuition-free again, set minimum faculty- and staff-to-student ratios, raise pay for adjuncts and fix CUNY’s crumbling buildings and facilities. CUNY’s state budget request aligns well with the New Deal. It asks for an operating budget increase of $313 million to hire 1,075 additional full-time faculty, and add new mental health counselors and advisors without increasing tuition. The request also calls for an increased capital investment of $5.8 billion over the next five years.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, per-student state funding for CUNY senior colleges has decreased 18%, leading to tuition hikes, reduced services, over reliance on underpaid adjunct instructors and shortages of full-time faculty and staff. The pandemic exposed the harm wrought by the State’s lack of investment in CUNY. But investment in CUNY will help to power the State’s recovery from COVID-19.

CUNY was free for generations, when the students were primarily white. But tuition was imposed soon after the student body became majority minority. Today, the University serves a half million students, most of them Black and brown New Yorkers from underserved low-income and immigrant communities. And CUNY is vastly underfunded.

Library, computer lab and writing center hours and staff have been reduced and class sizes have increased in the years since 2008. Tuition has increased 73% at the senior colleges and 71% at the community colleges over the same period. And students have substantially less access to full-time faculty than their counterparts at SUNY colleges where the student bodies are predominantly white.

CUNY Rising Alliance has made this simple and easy to do by clicking this link.

 

The folks at CUNY Rising Alliance are asking that as many people as possible write to their New York State legislators and urge them to support a #NewDealforCUNY. What’s that?

The proposed legislation, New Deal for CUNY (A5843/S4461), is in the next state budget.

The New Deal for CUNY would make CUNY tuition-free again, set minimum faculty- and staff-to-student ratios, raise pay for adjuncts and fix CUNY’s crumbling buildings and facilities. CUNY’s state budget request aligns well with the New Deal. It asks for an operating budget increase of $313 million to hire 1,075 additional full-time faculty, and add new mental health counselors and advisors without increasing tuition. The request also calls for an increased capital investment of $5.8 billion over the next five years.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, per-student state funding for CUNY senior colleges has decreased 18%, leading to tuition hikes, reduced services, over reliance on underpaid adjunct instructors and shortages of full-time faculty and staff. The pandemic exposed the harm wrought by the State’s lack of investment in CUNY. But investment in CUNY will help to power the State’s recovery from COVID-19.

CUNY was free for generations, when the students were primarily white. But tuition was imposed soon after the student body became majority minority. Today, the University serves a half million students, most of them Black and brown New Yorkers from underserved low-income and immigrant communities. And CUNY is vastly underfunded.

Library, computer lab and writing center hours and staff have been reduced and class sizes have increased in the years since 2008. Tuition has increased 73% at the senior colleges and 71% at the community colleges over the same period. And students have substantially less access to full-time faculty than their counterparts at SUNY colleges where the student bodies are predominantly white.

CUNY Rising Alliance has made this simple and easy to do by clicking this link.