DAN ORZECHOWSKI
News Editor
On Jan. 3, the first day back to work after winter break, Dan Tramuta’s phone rang. Virginia Horvath, president of SUNY Fredonia, was on the line asking if Tramuta knew that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Andrew Cuomo were about to announce the blueprints for the Excelsior scholarship program.
Tramuta, who was the former president of the New York State Financial Aid Administrators Association, now serves as Fredonia’s vice president of Enrollment Services. For someone who has an extensive background in financial aid, he was still unaware of the Excelsior plans.
“Typically when something big like this is happening, I’m hearing something about it. I had no inclination as to what this announcement was going to be about,” said Tramuta.
Although the scholarship’s announcement was in January, its final regulations weren’t presented to the Higher Education Services Corporation’s (HESC) board of trustees until May 25. It took just five months to draft Excelsior’s requirements and guidelines.
Even though administrators were aware of the scholarship’s emergence, for many returning students, it was too late to receive any assistance from Excelsior.
Among a number of requirements, the scholarship is only granted to students who enroll in at least 12 credits per term and complete 30 credits per year. Because of the scholarship’s late launch, the only way a student could fulfil the credit requirement (if they hadn’t already), was to take courses over the summer — which students had to pay for out of pocket.
“Many students didn’t have the time to understand, prepare or execute the completion requirements tied to Excelsior. They didn’t know because [the scholarship] was introduced as a legislative initiative pretty late,” said Tramuta.
Fastforwarding to June 4, Tramuta received another call. This time it was from the governor’s office.
“HESC and the governor’s office asked me if our Fredonia students could do a soft launch of the Excelsior application,” said Tramuta. “So on June 6, the day before the application went live, I had 10 Fredonia students who actually went in and completed the application before anyone else saw it across the state.”
Later that afternoon, Tramuta made contact with HESC and SUNY, requesting for a conference call. His focus group of students wanted to relay their experience.
Upwards of 40 screens were found in the application. If questions were answered in a particular way, the user’s session would be terminated. Also during the soft launch, the focus group found that the application wasn’t compatible on every web browser.
According to Tramuta, the focus group made a huge difference.
“Our students were terrific. They were professional, they were strategic and they offered multiple suggestions to make sure that this application was tailored for student success,” he said.
As a result of the focus group, the application’s official launch was delayed from 12 to 18 hours later. Many of the students’ suggestions were also implemented to adjust the application.
A total of just over $2.2 million in scholarship money was dispersed amongst 557 undergraduate students this semester. Tramuta predicts that another 50 to 75 students will receive the scholarship once the Spring application period kicks off. This prediction is only a mere estimate though, since a date has yet to be set for the Spring application launch.
While many students across the state missed out on financial assistance because of the scholarship’s late announcement, the program could see a similar situation come Spring time.
On Oct. 1, Cuomo gave an update on Excelsior’s progress. He announced that 22,000 students attending public universities in New York have received the scholarship and said that the state “will continue to work to ensure that access to a college degree is not determined by family finances but rather is available to all who work hard and dream big.”
Cuomo, who has declared that Excelsior is a first-in-the-nation program that provides tuition-free college, is up for re-election on Nov. 6.
His office refused to comment.