ALBANY — State University of New York financial aid officers are frustrated over the lack of guidance on the state’s 2-year-old Excelsior Scholarship program which is supposed to provide free tuition to thousands of middle-class college students.

They are so fed up, in fact, that they want to be absolved of any blame regarding confusion about the program on the part of students and parents.

“We have gone months without formal written guidance,” said Sarah Buell, a SUNY financial aid officer from western New York.

“We are essentially, in our 64 campuses, establishing 64 different versions of this program,” Buell said Wednesday during a meeting of the board of trustees for the state’s Higher Education Services Corp. She indicated she was speaking as a member of the SUNY Financial Aid Professionals group.

Proposed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in 2017 and passed by the Legislature that April, Excelsior provides the “last dollar” of SUNY tuition for students whose family income is below $110,000. That is, it fills any gaps after other financial aid programs such as the Tuition Assistance Program, or other grants.

Buell said they expect that some 23,000 students will use the program statewide this year.

But responding to questions and helping students qualify has been an uphill battle since Excelsior started last year. Student family incomes have to be verified, and the academic course credits that participants are earning have to be checked as well. To participate, students are supposed to take 30 credits a year.

“There are just a lot of nuances in the program,” Buell said. “A lot of students don’t understand the details."

Buell said HESC, the agency tasked with administering the state's numerous student and federal loan and grant programs, has been saying since last winter they would issue formal written guidelines but it hasn’t yet happened.

Buell's complaints appeared to take some HESC officials by surprise.

HESC President Guillermo Linares conceded that there have been “multiple challenges’’ in getting the program in place. “This has been an enormous task for us on multiple levels,” he said. “You had a tremendous challenge in helping verify the credits for the students."

Don Kaplan, spokesman for Cuomo, said it's shocking that financial aid officers don't yet understand the program.

"The Excelsior Scholarship is now a year old and New York has devoted an enormous amount of resources towards explaining its policies and procedures. We would encourage any students to contact HESC directly if their schools are incapable of providing the appropriate direction," he said in a statement.

Buell isn’t the only one with concerns. A number of Facebook pages referencing the Excelsior program contain comments about the confusion that exists.

Nor are the issues limited to SUNY.

When Excelsior was first created, New York’s substantial private school sector complained that the prospect of free SUNY tuition would make it hard for them to compete. In response, Cuomo and lawmakers created the Enhanced Tuition Awards program modeled on Excelsior for private colleges.

But there were restrictions and only about 30 of the state’s more than 100 independent colleges and universities have signed up for the program.

Anthony Collins, a HESC trustee and president of Clarkson University, said many independent school officials mistakenly believe that if a student attends their institution with ETA money that the school can’t raise tuition.

In fact, independent schools can’t raise tuition for individual students using ETA, but they can raise it for other students.

“It’s really a strong misperception out there,” he said.

“There’s been a learning curve,” Emily Donohue, spokeswoman for the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, said in a telephone interview after the meeting.

A former president of CICU, Abraham Lackman, was elected as chairman of the HESC board on Wednesday. Lackman has also served as the secretary of the state Senate Finance Committee.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU