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Council Member Eric Dinowitz opens hearing on removing small financial barriers for CUNY students
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4 min
Council Member Eric Dinowitz, chair of the committee on higher education, opens the oversight hearing on removing small financial barriers for CUNY students. He introduces the main topics to be discussed, including application fees, unpaid balances, and transportation costs, emphasizing their significant impact on students' ability to enroll and attend classes.
- Dinowitz highlights proposals such as CUNY Fresh Start to settle unpaid balances and additional application fee waivers.
- He expresses personal support for free unlimited MetroCards for all CUNY students.
- The council member acknowledges the work of the Center for an Urban Future in researching and proposing solutions to these issues.
Eric Dinowitz
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Good afternoon.
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I'm council member Eric Dinowitz, chair of the committee on higher education.
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Welcome to our oversight hearing on removing small financial barriers for CUNY students.
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And as I always remind everyone, I am a proud CUNY alum, and I am the son of a CUNY alum, the husband of a CUNY alum, and the brother of a CUNY alum.
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A proud proud CUNY family.
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The hearing today is entitled removing small financial barriers for CUNY students.
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And I think for a lot of us in this room and a lot of people in New York City, perhaps what are small financial barriers to us are not that small to other people.
0:01:13
We It may have been a better title to call it removing relatively small financial barriers for CUNY students, but we ran out of space.
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So the barriers, some of these quote unquote small financial barriers, could be a $65 application fee when you apply to CUNY.
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The balance of a couple of hundred dollars for a course you dropped or an outstanding balance for materials or a lab fee something else you did not finish paying, but that stays in your account and keeps you from re enrolling for a new semester, sometimes years later, or even a MetroCard.
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Right?
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The the $5.80 round trip per day, again, is small, but that really adds up over the course of a week, a month, or a semester.
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We're gonna discuss all three of these barriers today.
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Interstate of the City address in March of twenty twenty five, city council speaker Adrian Emmes put forth a number of proposals that would increase initial and continued access to CUNY for current and prospective students.
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I've mentioned two of these proposals, CUNY Fresh Start, which would settle unpaid CUNY balances up to a thousand dollars for students so they're eligible to reenroll for classes, and additional application fee waivers so low income prospective students can apply at no cost.
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I know Alexander.
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That is a very exciting idea.
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You can continue to cheer for it.
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He's 11 old.
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So I I I just wanna say CUNY Fresh Start was originally proposed in a report by the Center for an Urban Future, and we're pleased to have Eli Dvorkin here with us today from Center for an Urban Future to provide expert testimony.
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On the topic of application fee waivers, I wanna note that I would personally like to see all of those application fees go away for New York City residents.
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And now to the metro cards or Omni cards or tokens depending how old you are.
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Subway tokens?
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What's that, you say?
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I don't know either.
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They didn't no one wrote tokens here.
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It's it's So I I just want to adjust to CUNY students who are here today.
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I know in, I think, every hearing we've had, not just the budget hearings, but in every hearing we've had on these critical issues, you've come and you've spoken about the importance of Metro cards and or Omni cards being a gateway to success for you or a barrier to your success, and I wanna make clear that we heard you, which is why it is in this hearing today.
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We know the cost of commuting by public transportation can sometimes mean the difference between attending and not attending class on a given day or between accepting an internship off campus that requires an additional commute during the day.
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I would personally like to see every single CUNY student have free unlimited MetroCards.
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And again, I want to acknowledge Ascended for an Urban Future whose executive director Jonathan Bowles co authored an op ed piece in twenty twenty three that calls for free MetroCards for all CUNY students, all CUNY community college students.
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He noted that in research on the topic, the cost of MetroCard was the most often cited non tuition reason for a student's dropping out of CUNY.
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I look forward to hearing some budget numbers from the CUNY administrators who are here to talk about these issues that are so important to the students, the prospective students, and their families, and which might actually be solved by the allocation of just a small fraction of New York City's annual budget.