SUNY Erie offering free tuition program for adults starting in the fall
New Yorkers aged 25-55 years old are eligible to apply to the SUNY Reconnect program. After financial aid is applied, the program will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books and supplies.
The program covers in-demand fields such as advanced manufacturing, engineering, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, green and renewable energy, nursing and other health fields, and technology.
Students who are already enrolled at SUNY Erie and those who have college credits can apply. In addition, students in the program can attend classes part-time or full-time.
Click here for more information.
Kayleigh Hunter-Gasperini joined the News 4 team in 2024 as a Digital Video Producer. She is a graduate of Chatham University.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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New York Post
9 hours ago
- New York Post
NYC voters torn over Zohran Mamdani's big plans to hike taxes on wealthy, corporations: poll
Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani's plans to hike taxes on corporations and wealthy New Yorkers has general election voters split, a new poll showed. Some 48% of voters were in favor of increasing the corporate tax on Big Apple-based companies to pay for free public transit and affordable housing — while 42% were in favor of upping taxes on the five boroughs' wealthiest residents, according to the poll by Honan Strategy Group. But support for corporate taxes plunged to 36% when voters were asked if they'd support a higher corporate tax if it meant chasing businesses out of Gotham. 4 New Yorkers are split on Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's plans to raise taxes on the rich and corporations, according to a new poll. AFP via Getty Images 'Should the city consider increasing the corporate tax for NYC-based companies to finance affordable housing and free public transit?' participants were asked initially. While 48% said yes, 42% said no, according to the poll. The poll also asked, 'Would you support free public buses if funded by a wealth tax?' Only 42% said yes, while 47% were opposed and 11% were unsure, the poll found. Slightly more than half — 53% — backed Mamdani's proposal for city-run grocery stores aimed at lowering food prices, even if that requires moderate tax increases on high earners, according to the poll. But 35% were opposed to the government-run stores while another 12% said they were unsure, the poll said. 4 A Mamdani supporter holding a sign calling him a 'champion' for working people at a rally on July 2, 2025. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Meanwhile, 51% supported a rent-freeze on rent-stabilized apartments even if it meant increased taxes on millionaires, while 28% opposed the proposal and 20% are unsure, according to the poll. Mamdani has proposed a new 2% tax on millionaires, and shifting the property tax burden to wealthier, 'whiter' neighborhoods. But voters are divided when asked what is the single most important issue facing today: 21% cite housing affordability, while another 21% say crime and violence. Another 14% of respondents cited Donald Trump, 8% said corruption and 7% said quality-of-life issues. As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani is considered the frontrunner in the mayor's race in deeply blue New York. He'll be facing incumbent Eric Adams and ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo — both running on independent ballot lines — as well as Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and independent Jim Walden. 'While there is consensus about some of the financial burdens that New Yorkers are feeling, opinions are more mixed and divided about some of the proposed policy solutions,' pollster Bradley Honan said. Mamdani's tax-the-rich proposals that would require approval in Albany and Gov. Kathy Hochul has so far seemed unwilling to support the measures. Still, voters overwhelmingly agree that the Big Apple is too expensive a place to live, according to the survey. For example, 93% of respondents said the city is having an affordability crisis and 80% agreed with the statement that New York City is increasingly only affordable for the rich people of Manhattan. 4 Mamdani supporters with 'Freeze the Rent' signs in Coney Island on June 21, 2025. Michael Nagle The poll also found that 72% agree their family is struggling to achieve the American Dream despite their hard work and effort and 61% agree that their personal income has stagnated and are not sure whether they can get ahead or not, while 56% say they are struggling every month to pay their rent/mortgage. Nearly two-thirds of voters said inflation had caused them moderate or significant hardship in the past year, while 25% said no hardship and 10% weren't unsure. Many voters are concerned about the city's condition. 4 The Post's cover on Mamdani's plan to give 'white neighborhoods' higher property taxes. Only 15% believe that the city is heading in the right direction, while 53% feel it is on the wrong track and 32% said they didn't know. The mobile phone text survey of 817 likely voters was taken June 25-26 — right after Mamdani's primary victory. It has a margin of error of +/-3.42%.
New York Post
14 hours ago
- New York Post
Unlike Zohran Mamdani, most Dems want prosperity — not class warfare
Liberals and progressives are celebrating Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani's primary victory as proof that New York City is ready for a 'democratic socialist' revolution. They're badly in need of a history lesson: Every socialist revolution has failed and set back the goals it meant to accomplish. Everywhere it has been tried, socialism has meant economic decay at best and mass death at worst. The global death toll from socialism and communism is roughly 100 million souls. Whether the victims died in Stalinist gulags, Mao's Great Leap famine or Pol Pot's 'killing fields,' the underlying logic was the same: When the state owns everything, the individual owns nothing — not even his life. Mamdani's own platform may seem more anodyne, but it is a distilled sampler of socialism's greatest failures: nationalized businesses (public utilities), price controls (rent freezes, 'affordable' everything) and government-run retail. Meanwhile, capitalism's ledger shows no mass graves — only the lifted living standards of billions. Even China's rise from Mao-made famine to middle-class affluence began the day Deng Xiaoping opened markets and let peasants keep what they grew. Mamdani promises city-run groceries to 'bring down prices,' as if 8 million New Yorkers will flock to a public-owned store without remembering Venezuela's empty-shelf socialism. He proposes a rent freeze, forcing down the price of housing. Berlin's leftist government tried the same stunt with its 2020 Mietendeckel: Apartment listings collapsed 41.5% in a single year. He proposes fare-free buses. Tallinn, Estonia, made transit free in 2013; a Royal Institute of Technology audit found ridership rose barely 3% and car traffic scarcely fell, even as taxpayers picked up the heavy bill. He proposes no-cost child care. Quebec's celebrated '$5-a-day' day care ballooned in cost and delivered a 'sizeable negative shock to non-cognitive skills' that lingered into adolescence, per the National Bureau of Economic Research — along with higher crime and lower life satisfaction. All this is funded, naturally, by punishing 'the rich' — until they decamp to Florida, just as over a million wealth-holders fled Fidel Castro's Cuba, 6 million Venezuelans (most college educated) abandoned Nicolás Maduro's 'Bolivarian miracle' and 15% of Russia's millionaires bolted in a single year once Vladimir Putin's neo-Soviet expansion started. The socialist mayoral hopeful's web site also touts 'public ownership of utilities,' a polite phrase for state takeover of the power grid. Another of Mamdani's proposals is boosting the city's minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030 — an 82% jump. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! That would saddle small employers with entry-level labor costs near $65,000 a year, forcing many to lay off staff, automate or close — and leave fewer rungs on the ladder for new workers. Then there's policing. This may be the part of Mamdani's platform that is most acutely not what it seems. In 2020, Mamdani embraced 'defund the police' during the city's summer of riots. Now he says he merely wants to shift funds to a new Department of Community Safety. Here's the irony socialists rarely acknowledge: Every successful socialist leader, from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Maduro Venezuela to Colombia's Gustavo Petro and Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum's Mexico, has depended on a stronger, more intrusive police force to enforce rationing, suppress dissent and make those neat five-year plans look 'orderly.' Finally, his 'Trump-proofing' proposal — getting ICE out of NYC and ending any cooperation with the feds — sounds like an open invitation for gangs like the Tren de Aragua and MS-13. Do New York City socialists expect everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya? Mamdani's agenda is doomed to fail because it doesn't understand that NYC's problem is not capitalism but its own government. High costs in New York stem from layers of policy that strangle them: restrictive zoning locks 75% of residential land into one- and two-family lots, prevailing-wage and union rules push subway construction to an eye-watering $2 billion to $3 billion per mile, and the New York City Housing Authority's $80 billion repair backlog shows what happens when government runs housing. Add the nation's heaviest big-city tax burden and miles of red tape, and you've got an economy in which prices climb and paychecks stall. Why are Democrats doing this to themselves? Part of the answer is Donald Trump. An unconventional Republican back in the White House has driven many liberals to think the best response is a hard-left hook. But backing Mamdani's agenda clashes with that of the majority of Democratic voters who value prosperity over class warfare — among them the millions of Latinos who've escaped socialism, support Democrats and now face a party willing to impose on them the very ideas that prompted them to flee. Santiago Vidal Calvo is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. The views are his own and not those of the Manhattan Institute.
New York Post
a day ago
- New York Post
New York's special interests will eat Zohran Mamdani for lunch
For all his radicalism, Zohran Mamdani's program is often as vaporous as steam wafting from a Midtown manhole. It's a lot more about vibes than about delivering real change. His city-owned grocery store scheme, for starters, is almost entirely symbolic — not any real answer to the price-gouging he and his fans pretends is common at privately owned markets. The initial plan is only for one city store in each borough: That literally can't make any difference for most New Yorkers. And those five stores can't even be a meaningful test because it'd be a disaster for the new mayor if any of the stores failed. Tellingly, Mamdani brags that Chicago has already done a 'feasibility study' for city-owned groceries. Problem is, no one can read the Chicago analysis, because city leaders shelved it — almost certainly because they discovered that municipal-owned supermarkets have no chance of success. Contrary to what the hipster socialists imagine, groceries' profit margins are not rich but as thin as deli-sliced ham: Keeping the store going requires obsessive management — not the casual oversight that's given the world the phrase 'good enough for government work.' Of course, even Mamdani's plans to finance his stores is as airy as coffee-cart bagels: He said he'd tap the $140 million that the city already gives away to corporate grocery chains as a subsidy — except his crack crew misread the facts on the city's 'Food Retail Expansion to Support Health' program. That $140 million, it turns out, is how how much private store owners invested in the local economy after getting much smaller tax breaks, not city outlays a mayor could redirect. The socialist's confusion here recalls fellow DSAer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's celebration when Amazon pulled out of the plan to build a major headquarters in Queens: This freed up $3 billion that New York could spend on schools instead of a corporate giveaway, she exulted. But no: The massive e-tailer had simply been promised (just like many other companies) tax breaks if it created so many jobs; with the deal dead, Amazon wouldn't generate any income for the state to hold off on taxing. Zeroed-out Zohran must have the same math tutor as AOC, because zilch is how much the city has on hand to pay for his food pantries posing as groceries. Of course, Mamdani actually got the funding for another of his pilot-project schemes — then lost it because he couldn't even cooperate with fellow Democrats. Ending fares on MTA buses is one of his big ideas for making NYC 'affordable'; he helped author a one-year experiment in fare-free buses on five routes in 2024 — only to see Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie quietly can the next year's funding after Mamdani refused to vote to pass the state budget. Reminder: Much of Mamdani's program — starting with getting $10 billion to cover many initiatives by hiking taxes on the rich — depends on getting Albany's OK, and he's going to need Heastie's enthusiastic support since Gov. Kathy Hochul has already said 'no go!' How will Heastie fight for a guy he already sees as a lightweight? Look: New York politics, state and city, is packed with deeply connected special interests — with public-sector outfits (unions, massive nonprofits) often more ruthless than the real-estate lobby and other private-sector players. Voters' revulsion at that corruption is a big reason Mamdani won the primary, but this crew will eat the pretty boy for lunch while he's busy filming his next viral YouTube.
