Public Colleges Are The American Dream’s Last Refuge—For Now

Take the City University of New York (CUNY). One recent study of Department of Education data gave 8 of the top 15 spots for mobility to CUNY colleges, and US News & World Report ranks CUNY collectively as 11th, with the top 10 largely going to schools in the Cal State and UC systems. The American Dream has clung to life at these schools, combining world-class education with real opportunity for students to find a path to success, no matter what zip code they grew up in. That dream’s continued survival is in open question now, thanks in part to cuts to federal aid and loan support and a massive reduction in research support from multiple government agencies.

There are some likely culprits for why private universities no longer deliver mobility. Cost of living has outstripped wage growth for decades, and between 1980 and 2019, the cost of college almost tripled, while wage growth for the bottom 90% of families grew slowly. In the post-Covid inflation era, that has only gotten worse. In addition, private colleges draw a disproportionate number of students from wealthy families; it’s just mathematically harder for the children of the well-to-do to achieve upward mobility. The reverse is true for public colleges; they educate a disproportionate number of students from working- and middle-class families, and the tuition is generally less. But that last open door is closing.

These schools were once funded by tax dollars, affordable for the children of rich and poor alike. Moving to a system where students take on taxpayer-subsidized debt sounded like a way to save costs, but in reality it encouraged an upward spiral. Lenders of student debt are at zero risk of default (only the taxpayer is on the line), so it’s always trivially easy to ask the next class to take out a bigger loan. It also shifted who paid. Instead of successful citizens paying for the next generation to go to public colleges, we now ask 18-year-olds to pay older generations for the privilege of attending. We have reached a point now where college is once again becoming a luxury good, threatening economic mobility. Penn State’s full-time in-state tuition is now $20,644 per year, or $35,118 with food and housing. Presuming that food and housing are in fact necessary, that means a student without financial support from their parents would have to earn at least ~$17/hr working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, with virtually nothing left over. Simply put, we have priced out “paying your way” through school without a scholarship or federally supported loans—the cap on which will begin to decrease in 2026.

With government support waning and costs continuing to rise, the onus will likely fall on donors. “I remember a time when public colleges didn’t used to raise nearly as much money… because they didn’t have to,” said Ann Kaplan, President of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), to Inside Higher Ed. “Now if you look at the top gift-receiving schools, half of them are public… That’s going to happen to community colleges, too. It’s just a matter of time.”

Some philanthropists are already stepping up. As of September 2025, Mackenzie Scott’s giving totals $19.2 billion, including more than $2.7 billion in unrestricted gifts to hundreds of schools—most of them community colleges and HBCUs. The McNulty Foundation has many academic partnerships we’re proud of, at both private and public universities, but in terms of creating economic mobility in the United States, our most impactful partnership is with one of CUNY’s flagship institutions, Hunter College.

Hunter offers an affordable education to all of New York’s students, as well as a myriad of programs like a scholarship and leadership development program for undergraduate women in STEM that we’ve supported for the last 15 years, and we recently endowed the Chair for Science Innovation and Leadership at Hunter College, which was first occupied by Dr. Mandë Holford, now at Harvard, whose own talents were cultivated as a former student within the CUNY system. In a city defined by extreme financial pressures on working- and middle-class families, Hunter College offers a world-class education within reach for those families and their children.

Programs like ours at Hunter have shown that working in research labs is one of the best ways STEM students can begin building their careers while still in school, and getting in labs and on papers early on is highly correlated with later career success and leadership positions. These vital early science jobs are historically largely funded through federal grants. Unfortunately, that funding landscape has recently been devastated. While the White House has engaged in direct fights with Ivy League universities, using research grants as a bargaining chip, the mayhem at HHS has been an even larger factor. The National Institute of Health (NIH) has long been the largest funder of direct research on the planet, alongside peer agencies like the CDC. The effect on science as a whole from the withdrawal of these funders is hard to overstate.

We have seen what these cuts mean to schools like Hunter. Research labs are seeing funding paused or cancelled outright, with entire programs sunsetting without warning. This not only threatens the livelihoods of Hunter researchers and their student assistants but also deprives society of the vital discoveries they are making in areas such as breast cancer, aging, climate science, and special education. The communities and families whose lives could improve from that research all stand to lose when funding disappears. And these cuts will create fewer opportunities for students to train as the next generation of scientists, physicians, and researchers—opportunities we are passionate about protecting.

Whether or not you have a spare $19.2 billion, if you want to improve opportunities for the next generation, it’s clear that the biggest impacts come from quality public institutions. It feels unfair to ask private citizens to pick up the slack while these institutions are undermined by the government that once supported them—but not as unfair as abandoning them would be. Certainly, we can advocate for returning to more robust public support for schools and support politicians who will reform this broken system. But we can’t abandon the students there now.

In the short term, those with resources to give (most of whom have benefitted immensely from past generations’ investment in our education system) can invest in the students who most need it and the schools that best serve them. Philanthropy can provide life support while others sound the alarm to fund future generations. Working-class and middle-class families with college-aged kids and adults looking to go back to school don’t exist in a world where this is a future problem. Their lives and their careers depend on us addressing this problem now. The good news is that school systems like CUNY, and others around the nation, can still deliver economic mobility… for now. That may change unless we can properly fund and support affordable public models before the costs spiral out of reach.