“SUNY students think this is unwise,” said Julie Gondar, a University at Albany student, who serves as president of the Student Assembly. “We feel keeping tuition at the current level is simply not sustainable, and does not support access and affordability in the long term.”

The underlying fear of students is the loss of concentration options at schools throughout the state college system. With SUNY losing “about 1/3 of its support over the last three years” they fear that colleges will increasingly scale back on programming.

“We fear that this latest cut to SUNY will mean more campuses being forced to phase out programs much in the way New Paltz has done with nursing, Geneseo with communication disorders, and Albany with several languages,” she said.

However students are adamant that if increases do come that they are installed incrementally and used specifically to address Higher Ed spending. The previous jolt to tuition was a sharp $625 increase that went directly to pad general budget woes. The new plan could be shaped similarly to a proposal by former Governor Paterson and championed by Western New York legislators “to raise tuition by only 2.5 times the five-year average rate of the Higher Education Price Index, a widely used measure of colleges’ inflation costs” Though any plan that would give college presidents and trustees more say over tuition pricing will have significant opposition in the State Senate and Assembly as proved last year over the UB2020 plan.

The Welfare Rights Initiative is a 15 year old organization dedicated to addressing the systemic issues behind welfare reform by providing education, legal, social service and advocacy program training. These tools empower young men and women to organize for fair and equal access to among other things, the right to a higher education.

Part of what allowed this program to flourish was their successful push in 2000 to get college enrollment and work-study recognized as sufficient for fulfilling  the welfare work requirement . However to get this passed advocates had to jump enormous hurdles. The passage of the Work Study and Internship Bill in 2000 essentially rested on the leadership of State Senators Tom Duane (D) and Ray Meier (R) ability to foster bi-partisan cooperation between the parties and correct an injustice in the CUNY system that had already “lost over 20,000 students receiving public assistance because of misguided federal, state and city welfare policy”

Now 10 years later what was originally a 2 year renewal law has finally been made permanent when Gov. Patterson signed The Work Study Internship Law on June 29^th with the overwhelming support of legislators from both sides of the aisle.

“The law has allowed thousands of students receiving welfare to continue their college enrollment while participating in work study, internships and externships. It has been one of the most effective tools in allowing individuals to benefit from the life-changing impact of higher education. Research studies over the years have affirmed this positive impact–over 88 percent of individuals who attain a college degree move out of poverty”

- WRI Press relase

We congratulate Welfare Rights Initiative for their lastest victory and look forward to seeing what kind of future accomplishments WRI trailblazers will create in the years to come

This summer the MYD Education Committee began a series of education discussions focused on exploring current approaches being presented in the debate to reform education. Our goal was to evaluate how leaders were meeting the challenge of improving current practices and upgrading the existing infrastructure to close the learning gap for all children regardless of race, culture or economics.

If you’re interested in learning more or becoming part of our committee just email Ahmed at education@gomyd.com

He then moves on to dissect the doctors’ argument by looking at other goods the public deems vital, specifically education, and asks how those goods would look if they were provided in the same way as heath care.

He writes:

Correctly viewed, a modern university is a prepaid, staff-model, pedagogic group practice – the educational analogue of a staff-model health maintenance organization, or H.M.O., like the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan.

Like H.M.O.’s, which are prepaid an annual capitation for all of an insured person’s medically needed services, universities are prepaid one annual tuition fee for all the pedagogic services going into the education of the student.

But suppose universities operated instead on a piece-rate compensation basis, like the current health system. They would then be merely a pastiche of different pedagogic profit centers, each with its own fee schedules and ownership patterns.

What he describes is not a particular reassuring backdrop to figuring out how to pay for college and although his post does not solve the health care debate, I think that when we apply the same reasoning to higher education that is currently applied to heath care we see how unreasonable it is to argue that we should not reform the way doctors and hospitals currently do business.