Going to college in New York state just got a little easier for middle class families. Starting this fall, undergraduate students attending a State University of New York or a City University of New York college will be able to get the Excelsior Scholarship - which offers free tuition - as long as their families don’t earn more than $100,000 a year.
Eligible students will not have to pay for tuition, which costs $6,470 per year at four-year colleges and $4,350 at community colleges. There are some rules: students have to be full-time, taking 30 credits a year, and after graduating, scholarship recipients have to live and work in New York for the same number of years they got the funding.
But rules aside, this opens up a lot of opportunities for students who wouldn’t be able to afford to attend otherwise. "Today, college is what high school was -- it should always be an option even if you can't afford it," Governor Andrew Cuomo says in a statement.