City College Students Protest Tuition Increases

City College student Shaila Bora speaks out against CUNY
 tuition increases during a campus rally to “mourn the
death of higher education.”

New York - Halfway through a Thursday afternoon at City College, as students waited in the coffee line in the North Academic Center, a wave of sobs descended from upstairs.
Dressed in black, holding a giant cardboard gravestone, a group of student activists were mourning “the death of higher education,” circling through the building and outside.
“We are here today to eulogize our free education,” Carlos Pazmino, 22, wearing a suit and tie for the occasion, told passersby. “It saddens me to say that our free education is dead.”
Pazmino has joined Students for Educational Rights, one of several City College groups protesting the school’s tuition increases.
As Pazmino explained in a speech at the rally, City College began as an experiment in 1847 to provide a free education “for the sons and the daughters of the lower and middle class of that time.”
As the first public college in New York and the nation’s premier tuition-free university, City College remained tuition-free for over 100 years before it began charging students in 1976. As the school rose in national rankings—it’s now recognized by The Princeton Review as a top school—its tuition rose as well.
According to the College Board, City College’s full-time tuition totals $5,130 for in-state students, plus $13,180 for room & board. Though the amount pales in comparison to the pricey tuition at New York University ($43,204) or Columbia University ($47,246), members of Students for Educational Rights, and other campus groups, argue that their university began as a way to educate a different demographic.
“It was free through the Great Depression, which was the worst economic hardship this country has ever seen,” said Shaila Bora, 26, a sophomore philosophy major. “It was free during two world wars. And now there’s a downturn of the economy and all of a sudden, it seems they prioritize other things over education.”

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