It gave you $150 a semester and that paid tuition for the Baby Boomer generation in New York. All you needed was an 85 on your Regents exams and in New York you had free college as long as you could make it to a campus on a regular basis.
For those under 35: by the early 2000s NY started changing the format, difficulty level, and grading formulas for all the required Regents exams, making an 85 no longer meaningful in most subjects as a distinguishing characteristic. Each time they’d roll out a new exam, the first time they gave it statistically almost everyone would do terribly, then the next time they’d adjust the grading so the scores went way up, making it nearly impossible to fail and very easy to get above 85.
As for letting the region die: as you say, it’s entirely possible to have a beautiful region that people mostly don’t go to. Ithaca is great, but Potsdam is not Cornell and even then Cornell’s weather and remoteness and culture are a tough sell for many people (it certainly wasn’t good for the mental health of many of the people I knew who went there, which I nearly chose to do). This is something the world has never really had to grapple with before. In the past, when your region started to die, what was left pretty quickly got razed by invaders or destroyed in a fire or natural disaster, and then either it was gone, or people came in and rebuilt. We’ve mostly conquered these problems without coming up with a decent plan for how to renew aging infrastructure in a vibrant and productive city (like e.g. Boston), let alone a dying community.
I was on the cusp of the old Algebra-Trig-Calc Regents to Course 1, 2, & 3 in the early 1990s, it is a funny game.
The interesting thing about the region is the Amish have moved in, and I think that is somewhat disguising youth population decline. Technically they make lots of kids, but those kids have severely limited employment options. The Amish got there in the 1970s and have expanded rapidly. There are also four colleges, Clarkson, St. Lawrence, SUNY Potsdam and SUNY Canton. Most likely the two SUNY schools will be merged in coming years.
Only mentioning the colleges because we recently had a big clue about Albany‘s attitude towards rural campuses. The state legislature allocated a bunch of money to help the rural SUNY schools, and gave it to the SUNY system. Even though the money was intended for the rural colleges, it wasn’t specific enough in how it was allocated and so SUNY central decided to just give it all to their main campuses.
Now the Governor is talking about making SUNY schools profitable like they are a business.
I guess my inspiration for writing this is knowing the region so well, knowing it is heavily dependent on the government and knowing that I have never experienced uncertainty like now. So much of region is dependent on Canadians and one of the main bridges to Canada lost a nearly million just in tolls in one year.
I went to CMU in Pittsburgh for grad school, the citybitself is half the size it once was, and some of the surrounding towns have lost as much as 90% of their population. At some point shifting economic geography just makes maintaining some places really tough. The question is, what could actually shift things a different way? Outside money is not a sustainable solution unless it’s building something that really makes sense.
Meant to add one more thing- declining property tax base is a death spiral, but recent population decline suggests excess local capacity to supply water and electricity. Are towns in the region trying to attract data centers? Various kinds of energy-hungry cleantech company projects? I know somr are trying to do that in Quebec.
For those under 35: by the early 2000s NY started changing the format, difficulty level, and grading formulas for all the required Regents exams, making an 85 no longer meaningful in most subjects as a distinguishing characteristic. Each time they’d roll out a new exam, the first time they gave it statistically almost everyone would do terribly, then the next time they’d adjust the grading so the scores went way up, making it nearly impossible to fail and very easy to get above 85.
As for letting the region die: as you say, it’s entirely possible to have a beautiful region that people mostly don’t go to. Ithaca is great, but Potsdam is not Cornell and even then Cornell’s weather and remoteness and culture are a tough sell for many people (it certainly wasn’t good for the mental health of many of the people I knew who went there, which I nearly chose to do). This is something the world has never really had to grapple with before. In the past, when your region started to die, what was left pretty quickly got razed by invaders or destroyed in a fire or natural disaster, and then either it was gone, or people came in and rebuilt. We’ve mostly conquered these problems without coming up with a decent plan for how to renew aging infrastructure in a vibrant and productive city (like e.g. Boston), let alone a dying community.
I was on the cusp of the old Algebra-Trig-Calc Regents to Course 1, 2, & 3 in the early 1990s, it is a funny game.
The interesting thing about the region is the Amish have moved in, and I think that is somewhat disguising youth population decline. Technically they make lots of kids, but those kids have severely limited employment options. The Amish got there in the 1970s and have expanded rapidly. There are also four colleges, Clarkson, St. Lawrence, SUNY Potsdam and SUNY Canton. Most likely the two SUNY schools will be merged in coming years.
Only mentioning the colleges because we recently had a big clue about Albany‘s attitude towards rural campuses. The state legislature allocated a bunch of money to help the rural SUNY schools, and gave it to the SUNY system. Even though the money was intended for the rural colleges, it wasn’t specific enough in how it was allocated and so SUNY central decided to just give it all to their main campuses.
Now the Governor is talking about making SUNY schools profitable like they are a business.
https://www.syracuse.com/schools/2026/02/suny-makes-progress-toward-getting-struggling-schools-back-into-the-black.html
I guess my inspiration for writing this is knowing the region so well, knowing it is heavily dependent on the government and knowing that I have never experienced uncertainty like now. So much of region is dependent on Canadians and one of the main bridges to Canada lost a nearly million just in tolls in one year.
https://northcountrynow.com/stories/a-year-without-canadians-obpa-loses-nearly-1-million-in-2025-tolls,349219
Anyhow, anytime you hear of rural Japan, as a local I have a feeling a lot of upstate NY will follow.
I went to CMU in Pittsburgh for grad school, the citybitself is half the size it once was, and some of the surrounding towns have lost as much as 90% of their population. At some point shifting economic geography just makes maintaining some places really tough. The question is, what could actually shift things a different way? Outside money is not a sustainable solution unless it’s building something that really makes sense.
Meant to add one more thing- declining property tax base is a death spiral, but recent population decline suggests excess local capacity to supply water and electricity. Are towns in the region trying to attract data centers? Various kinds of energy-hungry cleantech company projects? I know somr are trying to do that in Quebec.