While pleading with lawmakers to restore millions of dollars in cuts to SUNY, Chancellor Nancy Zimpher floated another idea. She wants to raise revenue for the higher education system by slowly raising the annual tuition. Our Mike Whittemore has the details.

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ALBANY, N.Y. -- "I don't want to diminish the challenge of this. We're cutting left and right. This is not working for us."

Echoing the outrage expressed by students and faculty last week, SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher railed against the funding cuts in Governor Andrew Cuomo's executive budget proposal during a joint legislative hearing Thursday.

Zimpher says SUNY weathered a negative impact of $1.1 billion over the last three years that has forced the 64 campus system to diminish services, programs and course offerings, enact hiring freezes, increase class sizes and rely on adjunct faculty.

Cuomo's budget calls for an additional $235 million cuts to SUNY-run colleges, universities and hospitals. Zimpher says cuts that deep would eliminate all state funding to hospitals that partner with SUNY in Brooklyn, Long Island and Syracuse, which employ about 12,000 health care professionals and serve more than a million patients.

"These three hospitals are our laboratories for the preparation of doctors. The demands on this state to prepare more doctors will only increase under health care reform," Zimpher said.

Cuomo's budget does not specifically call for tuition hikes. But Zimpher says in order for the SUNY system to withstand reductions in state aid, the legislature will eventually need to consider raising tuition. The trick, she says, is doing it in a way that doesn't abruptly affect students already attending college.

"What we're trying to do is level out the expectation for the cost of college so that people can be painful so they aren't a freshman at one point price and at the sophomore year they have a huge hike in tuition, which has happened on several occasions in the past," Zimpher said.

Zimpher announced she's working to develop a plan that would raise tuition gradually over a five year period. The details of that plan are still being worked out, but the Chancellor says it would be modeled after SUNY's five year construction and building strategy. Last year, an effort to grant SUNY administrators, rather the legislature, the authority to set tuition failed.