[EVG file photo]
Gothamist has the story:
Cooper Union will officially start charging its undergraduates tuition, after the Board of Trustees rejected a 54-page report compiled by a Working Group of alumni, staff, students and trustees that outlined a plan to keep the school free.
Felix Salmon has an opinion piece on the decision today at Reuters titled The shame of Cooper Union.
An excerpt:
The minute that Cooper starts charging tuition, it loses its soul. It becomes a second-choice college in the most expensive part of the most expensive city in the world, which will never regain the kind of love and loyalty among its students and teachers that produced the summer’s sit-ins and the fall’s Working Group Report.
13 comments:
I am uninformed on the situation, but on the surface, Reuters seems to be saying that a CU education is only worth it if it's free, that it's actually just a second-rate school.
I know they'd been offering it for like hundreds of years previously but I still gotta marvel at the gift of a free college education. I mean its too bad they can't offer it anymore but to me it seems weird to clamor for something that in the first place is an extraordinary gift.
I'd like to see the 54 page "how to keep the school free" report. Then I'd understand (or not) why it was rejected. Anyone have a copy?
Too abd they totally mismanaged their wildly-overpriced building program;; maybe if they had been content to keep the nice old buildings they had rather than building hideous eyesores they could still offer free schooling.
WAAAAAAHHHHHH my education isn't free.
D
@Legitimate Golf - No, the point is that if tuition is free, the school can afford to be extremely choosy about the students it admits. Impoverished but brilliant students don't have to be bumped in favor of less-worthy students with richer parents. So the student body is very, very smart.
That's gone, now.
@Gojira - there was a lot more mishandled than the buildings program. I'd dug out references in a previous comment; not willing to re-dig, but the gist is that the board consists of second-rate, self-contratulatory businesspeople who know nothing about running a school and are not willing to listen to people who do. They've been mismanaging the finances for several decades now, in spite of many warnings. Not so incidentally, the number of adminstrators, and the size of their compensation, has ballooned.
This kind of thing happens a lot.
@anon 7:13
How are the suburbs of Cleveland treating you?
Not being privy to the schools finances, you have to assume they can no longer afford to be tuition free. This is the real world. Things sadly cost money. Will all the protesting students work for free when they graduate??
January 12, 2014 at 8:53 AM
The Felix Salmon opinion piece IS all about the real world and how/why charging tuition at CU will ultimately kill it by turning it into nothing special. But thanks for mansplaining to us about how things cost money, dad.
It is fitting that the very Board of Trustees that have mismanaged the school's finances are the ones that rejected the Working Group report.
Everything I've read about the management of the school's finances is just bang-your-head-against-the-wall incompetent. And the students going forward are paying the price for that incompetence.
I'm not originally from NYC, but even in Podunk, USA where I grew up Cooper Union was known, respected and (sometimes) revered. So I'm guessing "Anon 7:13" lives in the neighborhood and is bitter they paid $35K a year to go to [generic mediocre private school].
Here's the link to the report:
BoT report
Thanks. Here are some of the highlights:
1) Replace old expensive teachers with younger cheaper teachers
2) Pay working faculty (especially adjunct) less
3) Eliminate part time teachers
4) Get rid of some of the adjunct faculty by making other teachers teach more
5) Charge students if they take extra classes beyond minimum required to graduate
6) Charge students if they re-take a class
7) Rent out the Great Hall for events
8) Sell more “professional studies” courses to the public
"When the financial crisis (at Cooper Union) hit, many alumni volunteered to work for free. This violated union contracts”.
Also: Eliminate excess security, rent out the St. Mark's/3rd avenue corner to a retail establishment
Interesting ideas. I couldn't figure out if the numbers add up to whatever is the shortfall.
I wonder why it was rejected if the numbers DO add up.
@ 12:28
Suburbs of Cleveland? Try NYC born, raised, still living here, and sick of a bunch of self-entitled BRATS crying about having to pay for their higher education when EVERYONE ELSE IN THE CITY (including CUNY students) HAS TO.
D
Why in a world where we have a congressional investigation for baseball players using Performance enhancement drugs...not my problem or concern. Do we not have an investigation into the shady world of Cooper Union's mismanagement? Peter Cooper left an endowment that was more than sufficient to sustain the institution for decades. Alum are even encouraged/expected to give back, which as I understand they do generously. Not to mention the land that is leased to the Chrysler building and other real estate holdings should generate more than enough funds to not require any changes to this long standing institutions endowment. Something is rotten in Denmark...I mean New York.
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