Grading New York’s Colleges

This post originally appeared on www.tcf.org

By: Yan Cao | March 23, 2018

With an investment of more than $300 million per year, New York State provides more state scholarship funds to private colleges than does any other state.¹ While the bulk of these funds are administered through the New York Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) to students attending nonprofit institutions, more than a fifth ($68 million in 2015–16) goes to for-profit schools.² In fact, of the twenty-seven states that provided any grants to for-profit institutions in 2015, New York spent the highest amount.³

Last year, Governor Cuomo expanded the state’s commitment to college affordability, announcing a new Excelsior Scholarship for New Yorkers attending the state’s public colleges, and an Enhanced Tuition Awards Program (ETAP) for nonprofit colleges. Now, as New York implements its expansion of aid to students at public and nonprofit institutions, and considers expansion of ETAP to for-profit institutions, recently released federal data provides an opportunity to assess the benefits that New York and its students are enjoying from the state’s investment in public, private nonprofit, and private for-profit colleges.

In this report, The Century Foundation uses federal data sets to provide new, state-level analysis of the following three measures of higher education quality:

• Employment Outcomes. Which schools produce employment outcomes that are demonstrably better than opportunities for typical high-school graduates?
• Financial Distress. Which schools are most likely to lead students to financial distress and default?
• Investment in Education. What share of tuition revenue—including taxpayer-funded grants—is allocated to student instruction?

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Read and download the full report by The Century Foundation here.