It gave you $150 a semester and that paid tuition for the Baby Boomer generation in New York. All you needed was an 85 on your Regents exams and in New York you had free college as long as you could make it to a campus on a regular basis.
For those under 35: by the early 2000s NY started changing the format, difficulty level, and grading formulas for all the required Regents exams, making an 85 no longer meaningful in most subjects as a distinguishing characteristic. Each time they'd roll out a new exam, the first time they gave it statistically almost everyone would do terribly, then the next time they'd adjust the grading so the scores went way up, making it nearly impossible to fail and very easy to get above 85.
As for letting the region die: as you say, it's entirely possible to have a beautiful region that people mostly don't go to. Ithaca is great, but Potsdam is not Cornell and even then Cornell's weather and remoteness and culture are a tough sell for many people (it certainly wasn't good for the mental health of many of the people I knew who went there, which I nearly chose to do). This is something the world has never really had to grapple with before. In the past, when your region started to die, what was left pretty quickly got razed by invaders or destroyed in a fire or natural disaster, and then either it was gone, or people came in and rebuilt. We've mostly conquered these problems without coming up with a decent plan for how to renew aging infrastructure in a vibrant and productive city (like e.g. Boston), let alone a dying community.
The North Country of New York runs along the Canadian border at the top of the state. It is where I grew up, my grandfather walked across the border with about a third grade education not long after the turn of the century.
That region along the Canadian border is getting very close to 1 in 4 people over 65. Even though I grew up there and had tenure at SUNY Potsdam I sadly still left. In 1990 my high school class at Beekmantown (north of Plattsburgh) graduated 120 students, we played Potsdam high school in sectional basketball. Potsdam graduated around 140 students that year. Potsdam now graduates classes of 75-85. SUNY Potsdam now has less than half as many student as at peak. From around 4,500 to around 1,800 today.
Many faculty at SUNY Potsdam rent a room in town and drive from Albany where they live the rest of the time. There is a death spiral seemingly forming on campus, dorms are shuttered and buildings are being town down and departments like Theater are shuttered.
Talking about SUNY Potsdam 30 years ago being so full of students that they are cramming three people into rooms, offering incredible food options and attracting world class faculty sounds like a fantasy today. It joins my ‘in the 90s Microsoft bought Apple stock to help Apple stay in business’ canon of stories that sound fake. Phish played SUNY Potsdam when I was there and it graduated more math majors than any Math department on the East Coast in the early 1980s. (sample from news article below)
“Sure, Dad.”
On that note, New York had something called “the Regents Scholarship” until 1990. It gave you $150 a semester and that paid tuition for the Baby Boomer generation in New York. All you needed was an 85 on your Regents exams and in New York you had free college as long as you could make it to a campus on a regular basis.
Time for some synthesis. I grew up on a long rural road, 45+ minute walk to a gas station. How does a young person like that get the car to go to the local campus? Thus dorms.
Dorms became a money making thing for colleges, as the state cut support fancy dorms became a thing nation-wide. I was told only 20% of SUNY Potsdam’s funding came from the state when I worked there.
Here’s the “old logic” part. SUNY central bans campuses from setting their own basic dorm rate. Look at the dates on this policy document, all from the 1980s. Policy from a time where professors could smoke in class as they taught. A dorm at Potsdam, where students have to drive hours on rural roads to get there, costs $11,830. A dorm at SUNY New Paltz is a quick train ride from NYC and costs $11,760. The idea was to prevent campuses from competing with each other using cheap dorms.
To make the most vulgar explanation of how messed up this is, my home in Potsdam was a four bedroom Arts & Crafts house that costs $47,000 to buy. Here is a link to St. Lawrence County homes for sale for less than $100,000. Four years in a dorm is nearly half a house?
So in a geographic area where we have a cratering youth population we have the SUNY system charging young people more than if they want to live on a campus where you can pop off to NYC every weekend. If you know Potsdam’s campus, this policy has resulted in Knowles dorm (which can house 500+ students) being closed and empty. There are so many students who absolutely would pick rural campuses if the dorms were included. Nobody needs this like the students who go to high school in rural areas. My high school class was 120 and there was one person with one parent who was not white. Free dorms would give rural kids a chance to interact with a diverse set of other kids.
Why are we not giving those dorms away for free? Because lack of funding for SUNY has caused campuses to rely on dorms for revenue, except the rural campuses can no longer fill dorms. When a college tells students they need to live on campus there are commonly reasons that have nothing to do with education.
Why not let the area die? Because it is a great place to live if you have community. I live in Ithaca, NY now, we have amazing waterfalls here and if you go to one you will be with lots of other people also visiting. At Potsdam my friends and I swam in waterfalls all day and saw nobody. My cheap house was a block from the river so I kayaked nearly every day from April until October. When I lived there and a family had a baby the community organizes and drops off food every day for a month. I know there are people who would prefer that life and never get a chance to even go up there.
New York no longer has a massive youth population looking to get into any SUNY they can. The state could show it knows how to get parts of its government to work together to serve larger needs. Stop charging young people a small fortune to move to the parts of the state where we desperately need young people. Much of the ‘free tuition’ stuff we have heard is smoke and mirrors. Think about what a free dorm would do to the competitiveness of the campus. More students with money to spend at local businesses. Any time you hear about the plight of rural campuses the central idea comes from the obvious question of “why would anyone want to live there?”
New York paid for 24-7 care for tens of thousands of incarcerated men in the same region, sad to see the state miss the opportunity to save some communities by shelling out for some relatively cheap dorms.