BROOKLYN COLLEGE–After a devastating year for CUNY, marked by withheld funds and faculty layoffs, the state budget for Fiscal Years 2021-2022 is estimated to cut $26 million from CUNY and increase tuition for students by $200.
CUNY’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2022, which begins this summer, is $1.17 billion. Comparatively, CUNY’s budget in the 2019-2020 academic year stood at $4.7 billion. Since the pandemic closed campuses and put colleges online, Robert Mujica, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget director and a member of the CUNY Board of Trustees, has withheld close to $400 million of CUNY’s budget, or 20 percent of a $2 billion dollar budget for the summer and fall of 2021. The state, which provides 50 percent of CUNY funding, is presumably displacing the money to New York’s COVID related deficit, which is estimated to be at least $8 billion.
