“Once free tuition is buried, the politicians will want it to be forgotten. Others who take a longer view of higher education’s kinship to America as the land of opportunity will want to keep its memory alive… as a sensible and realistic option for a more affluent, more confident, and more generous day.”

Hechinzer, Fred M. “Who Killed Free Tuition.” The New York Times. May 18, 1976, 26.

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When first appealing to the federal government for a bailout, Mayor Beame staunchly opposed the imposition of tuition at CUNY. As a City College alum, he credited his career to CUNY’s free tuition and wanted to preserve this long-standing city practice. In the early days of the financial crisis, there was little support for eliminating free tuition at CUNY. During his campaign for New York Governor in 1974, Hugh Carey declared: “I believe that the state, not the students, must bear the burden of financing higher education in these days of inflation and higher costs.”¹ However, as the city’s finances became more dire, Beame’s and Carey’s stances weakened.² To acquire the necessary federal funding to keep New York City running, the city needed to demonstrate that it was willing to make fundamental changes and end its legacy of economic progressivism. CUNY, as the very radical symbol of that progressivism, was then put on the metaphorical chopping block.³

Governor Carey later rescinded his support for free tuition and threatened to pull state funds from CUNY if the Board of Higher Education (BHE) did not introduced tuition. With the city’s significant cutbacks to the university, state funds were essential to CUNY’s budget, so the BHE agreed to the state’s demands.⁵ “Opponents of free tuition call[ed] such an offer an act of fiscal realism; advocates of free tuition consider[ed] it political blackmail since the city is in no position to keep the university going without added state financing.”⁶

Tuition was officially introduced at CUNY for the 1976-1977 academic year, abruptly ending the university’s 129-year tradition. For freshman and sophomores, tuition was $650, and for juniors and seniors, tuition was $800. And from there, tuition costs continued to increase each year.

With the imposition of tuition also came tuition assistance programs at CUNY. The State Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) was established in 1974 with the intent of providing between $100 and $1,500 (and in 1977, between $200 and $1,800) to college students in need. Assistance was provided based on on family income, tuition costs, level of study, and previous TAP awards.

The report below audited the implementation of TAP at CUNY’s senior colleges between 1976-1978, and outlined the amount of awards given to students at different CUNY schools.

Implementation of the New York State Tuition Assistance Program at Senior Colleges of the City University of New York, 1979 June 22. Baruch College Reports. Baruch College Archives, William and Anita Newman Library. Click here for full item record.

However, it was not a perfect solution to the new tuition fees. For the 1976-1977 academic year, TAP award payments were delayed, and because CUNY schools required tuition payment upon registration, students who had not yet received their TAP award were unable to register for their classes. TAP reform was proposed in 1978 to better help CUNY students bear their new financial burdens. As summarized in the March 14, 1978 issue of The Ticker, Assemblyman Ralph Goldstein introduced a bill, which would allow students to defer their tuition payments. Goldstein asserted that “[it] is unreasonable for the University to penalize eligible and deserving students because the tuition assistance program cannot get its awards out in time for registration.”⁷ Also in the March 14, 1978 issue, The Ticker published a piece about the Higher Education Services Corporation’s (HESC) processing of students’ TAP applications. The article discusses the HESC’s improvement plans to speed up processing and simplify the TAP application.

Despite TAP and the HESC’s later improvements, CUNY’s enrollment numbers continued to drop significantly in the years following the imposition of tuition. These new tuition costs hit students of color especially hard. By 1980, there were 50% fewer Black and Latino freshmen enrolled compared to 1977. Effectively, the introduction of tuition undermined the equitable education promised by the Open Admissions policy.⁸

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1. Eric Lach, “The Case for More CUNY Funding,” The New York Times, March 26, 2022. ↩︎
2. Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and The Rise of Austerity Politics, 251.  ↩︎
3. Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and The Rise of Austerity Politics, 243. ↩︎
4. John Barnton, “Beame Censures His Commissioner,” The New York Times, July 26 1975, 53.  ↩︎
5. “The university system was in a bind: without changing tuition it could not get state aid, and without state aid it could not function… The introduction of tuition at CUNY marked the beginning of a change in the financing of the city university overall.” Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and The Rise of Austerity Politics, 251. ↩︎
6. Fred M. Hechinzer, “Who Killed Free Tuition,” The New York Times, May 18, 1976, 26. ↩︎
7. “Goldstein Introduces Bill to Aid CUNY Students,” The Ticker, March 14, 1978, 1. ↩︎
8. “Despite tuition support provided to needy students through the TAP and Pell programs and the continuation of remedial assistance offered by the College Discovery and SEEK programs, the bold Open Admissions experiment that had held such promise in the early 1970s was rapidly eroded.” “1978-1992 Retrenchment – Austerity – Tuition,” CUNY Digital History Archive, American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning.  ↩︎