New York has been hailed as a progressive state leading others for passing a budget that makes college tuition free for middle-class students.

"The New York bill is what's known as a 'last-dollar' program."

New York approved a state budget Sunday that included the Excelsior Scholarship, which will allow students whose families earn less than $125,000 a year to attend state public colleges and universities tuition-free.

New York’s plan is a step forward in returning to the days when students could work their way through public college without taking on debt. But the impact on reducing the need to borrow may be minimal, especially for first-generation, low-wealth students.

New York became the first state in the country to return to a guarantee of tuition-free college for students at state public colleges and universities.

April 9, 2017 (New York, NY) -- Tamara Draut, Vice President of Policy and Research at Demos, released the following statement after New York became the first state in the country to pass tuition-free college:

With so many eventual graduates starting at community colleges, we should take a hard look at institutional aid policies, which reward incoming freshmen much more than transfer students.

Another question is how much the Cuomo and Raimondo plans will truly benefit low-income students. Both proposals are what’s called “last-dollar” initiatives, meaning the states would only pay the balance of tuition after students use up existing state and federal aid, including Pell Grants. These

We’ve created our own bracket here, matching up colleges not by the number of McDonald’s High School All-Americans on their roster, but by whether or not they provide access to an affordable education and whether they are engines of upward mobility for working-class students.

“There are approximately zero students that would see a net benefit if this budget were enacted into law,” said Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. [...] “Consolidating or reforming campus-based aid programs is not a bad idea, but at the end of the day students