As stated in the introduction to “Education and Wealth Inequality,” higher education has become a necessity in today’s economy, but unfortunately it has still remained difficult for those lacking a substantial sum of money. Children born to college-educated parents are more than twice as likely to go to college compared to children with high-school-educated parents. Moreover, those same children when compared to kids born to high school dropouts are seven times more likely to go to college. Thus, when The City University of New York was forced to impose tuition, this impacted the lower classes the hardest. CUNY was introduced to New York City in 1847 as the Free Academy; its goal was to provide a higher education with high accessibility. As stated in the timeline, in the future CUNY would be pressured to give up its initial school mission, and to begin to decentralize by imposing tuition. However, there are many misconceptions about CUNY’s historical mission of a free college. Not everyone was offered it. Only “high-achieving high school students,” a.k.a. students with high enough high school averages, could qualify for four years of free tuition. The remaining students were offered night classes in which they did indeed have to pay for. In 1944, only 25% of New York’s top students were offered placement in CUNY’s merit-based tuition-free schools. Thus, tuition was not actually always free for all, and many students who had been offered less than adequate primary and secondary educations would still fall short. Nonetheless, it was not until the fiscal crisis in the ‘70s that CUNY’s budget began to diminish. At the same time the University made a rash decision to drop tuition charges and to allow any student with a high school diploma to access free tuition within the system.
But, by the summer of 1976, with increasing pressures from the government and large draws from government funding, CUNY was forced to impose tuition for all which made it more difficult for the lesser-fortunate to receive a higher education.
