After months of agonized debate about its 110-year-old tradition of free education, Cooper Union will begin charging graduate students next year while maintaining, at least for now, its no-tuition policy for undergraduates, the college’s president said Tuesday. — nytimes.com
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Cooper Union uses its $600 million endowment to cover operating deficits. Its assets include the land under the Chrysler Building in Midtown, on which it collects $7 million a year in rent (the amount is scheduled to rise to $32.5 million in 2018). This year, the college has stepped up its alumni fund-raising, an area where it had been relatively weak, and contributions have increased by almost one-third. Students have also organized a donation drive.
so how much does mr bharucha get paid? i don't understand with just that one land asset, as an example, increasing by that much in a few years how less than 100 grad students paying tuition are going to solve cooper's budget issues. who's making bank with this?
Does this have to do with growing pains? They're accepting more students, they have a new building to maintain.
Seems like they can't grow without having to charge money.
it does not have to do with growing pains.... Our campus is smaller now than it was before, not that that heap of garbage building did anything to help. Charging graduate student will not solve the schools financial issues it is but a very small way to begin alleviate the issue. Some of the students here are torn about the issue because Cooper was always meant to be a undergraduate school, and the graduate programs were always pitched to us as a profit generating venture. Either way we all have moral qualms in regards to the school charging tuition period. In an age of growing student debt, student will reach 1 trillion today, amongst an growing necessity to obtain a college degree, our country needs to stand for its future. We have politicians claiming that its the students fault, that they went to school and paid for it themselves, yet they fail to talk about how they pay for tax breaks by raising state tuition rates, California 10 years ago was practically free, now your looking at $20,000 or more a year. In my opinion Cooper needs to maintain its values at a time when values are morals are neglect from the discussion.
that build an unnecessary structure that cost more to maintain a year than they get in their $600 million endowment. so this is not growing pains and its not going to go back, the "council" bit off more than they can chew with this one. this news wasn't surprising it was always on they way when i heard they were having trouble maintaining. except if they found another stream of revenue this was always going to happen, but unless they were planning on buying into more assets then the students were always going to get hit with the bill. its a damn shame. good luck coop'unioners.
It's so unfortunate that they saw constructing an eye-catching building as being of higher priority that their core responsibility to their students.
Is anyone aware of what this means for incoming graduate students? It seems that the tuition waiver is intact for incoming 2012 and 2013 undergrads, but is the full ride still guaranteed for incoming 2012 and 2013 graduate students? The article fails to specify this.
The administration has failed to clarify, at a recent meeting their was a discussion about the inappropriateness of charging incoming graduate students who have already accepted an offer which may have been based on the school offering a full tuition scholarship. Most likely it will not affect the incoming class of Graduate Students, rather the class that follows. Also note that tuition is only for Graduate students at the moment, the school has not come out to say that they will charge undergraduate students as you hint at in your note.
Let's be clear here- Cooper is an undergraduate school at its core, and that is still what is being preserved. The graduate school, which is barely 3 years old, had the original intention of being charged from the beginning, as a revenue generator for the school. For some reason at the last minute it was changed to full tuition scholarship like the rest of the undergrads. The school always has had some other form of programs charging tuition, take the continuing education program for instance, which has one of the most sought after typography classes in the country. I believe the school is looking to bulk up its public programs so it can continue giving a free education to sustain Peter Cooper's vision of providing quality education for even the working class.
In the president's report:
"In its interim report, the Revenue Task Force has recommended that we explore fee-based academic programs that build on our unique strengths, while preserving, at least for now, full scholarships in our three core undergraduate programs. In this hybrid framework, new fee-based programs may include master’s and other professional programs, on-line programs, continuing education, partnerships, and interdisciplinary programs that integrate our schools in powerful way."
Now, the thing that terrifies me is the way "at lease for now" is used...
Also, read the whole thing (not NY Time's misinterpreted short version) here:
http://cooper.edu/about/news/update-president-bharucha-framework-action
danny, i somehow missed that the graduate school is only 3 years old. i think it's a sound anti-austerity plan to expand programs in order to generate more income (or at least it seems so), especially if that reinforces cooper union's commitment to tuition-free undergraduate degrees. but i agree that this clause "at least for now" doesn't exactly make the president's statements seem sincere. the eventual burden of cost to undergrads seems inevitable.
how do you view the trustees' and management's transparency in this issue?
*I spoke to the administration office at Cooper, and the full tuition waivers are intact for both 2012 incoming undergraduate students (as Bharucha stated) AND 2012 incoming graduate students.
I dont understand how Cooper has a new building... yet the campus is smaller.
So they wanted to compete with the other schools. What good is a free school if the facilities are outdated?
Its an upgrade, a growing pain and there might be more to come.
I wouldn't be surprised if enrollment goes up due to new programs in a few years
We use to be a three building campus, we are now a two building campus.
Yet the enrollment size is the same. I don't know about their logistics for space allocation, or people to floor area ratios. But I think if this starts to get treated like Occupy Wall Street it will fail.
For what its worth, Sci-Arc, RISD and the AA went through their own changes and it hurt.
Interesting, that "months of agonized debate" creates the impression that the debate had ended, when, in fact, two processes that were supposed to present recommendations to the administration were pre-empted by a board meeting and the announcement (note the "interim report" quotation above). I suggest you all read "The Way Forward" by The Friends of Cooper Union if you think that Cooper had no viable alternatives to this move, as is implied. Quite findable using Google.
One of the financial disasters that befell the college that architects can understand, a project anticipated to cost only $105 million was rushed to completion by the 150th anniversary of the college, and a guaranteed maximum price of $115 million didn't keep the thing actually costing $165 million, according to the college, which is $50 million in cash you didn't expect to spend (the accusation is change orders, but noone's talking). The other financial disaster was the market crash, which lost them at least $30 million (that they'll admit to). There were also exorbitant fees to pull off the GMP and the real estate deals, numbers they're amortizing but were, in fact, real cash outlays at the time.
For promising to vacate their old engineering building, they got an advance in lieu of rent for $97 million, but you can see from the previous paragraph where most of that went. Bottom line, at the end of 2011 their non-real estate endowment was about the same as it was at the beginning of 2000 (adjusting for inflation), but with higher operating costs (due to administrative bloat, not faculty salaries) and a huge debt service they had subject themselves to to get the GMP.
Check out the timeline in The Way Forward for the story between June 2011 and today.
Danny, I guess you mean the graduate architecture program, not the graduate engineering program, which is actually structured as an integrated 5-year undergrad/grad program. You are absolutely right that one should read the entire NY Times article, which actually says more than the letters posted on the Cooper websites.
There are two ways to look at this. One is to say that the Board is acting very slowly and cautiously, letting Bharucha attempt to get NYS Board of Regents approval in 2013 for some new-fangled for-pay graduate programs. The Times is very cautious about saying that there is no change in 2012, and "some" (presumably rich) graduate students in 2013 may be required to pay, because Bharucha continues to preach his "access" theme (and has re-written the entire history section of the Cooper website to support it). So the only thing that happens in 2012 are the austerity measures, which will mean much-needed administrative layoffs - it's the academic side of things that's unclear (is it faculty or academic support staff?). The graduate programs aren't accredited, so there's no accreditation threat. The viewpoint could be made that it's almost too slow.
The other viewpoint concerns the mission statement of the college, how what the Board approved is kind of a jujitsu with a really botched up process, certainly nothing equivalent to what resulted in the mission statement in the first place. The tale of Cooper trying to alter the mission statement on the website on the eve of Bharucha's inauguration is part-and-parcel with a series of website "corrections" that have been a key tactic of this administration, and doesn't inspire trust. The mission statement, and a proper process to create or alter it, is super-important to the Middle States Association, and is technically important to the Attorney General's office as well. I've heard the new director of alumni affairs say that there are several different mission statements, which is nonsense, I hope she meant that some people who claimed to be quoting the mission statement weren't doing so properly, but there still is the question of how Bharucha will sidestep the unambiguous language of the mission statement in such a way that full-tuition scholarships for undergrads is preserved but only providing access to the poor for higher level programs is now allowed. I mean, it's not like they're going to open up a gift shop in a museum and say, hey, it has nothing to do with the mission but it's okay.
The most hopeful sign is the $20 million yearly kick-in in 2018. If they could get more serious about cutting the bloat, if they could get more serious philanthropy going on, they might be able to make it to 2018 somewhat intact. The problem is that Bharucha has invested so much verbiage and webstuff into prepping for undergraduate tuition and turning Cooper into an honors college, it turns into a fight between really powerful people like Glazer who never want to see tuition happen, and non-alumni opportunists like Michaelson who have publically stated, like Bharucha, that they don't care whether Cooper goes tuition, as long as noone blames them for it.
My personal peeve is that Bharucha gets paid so much and he didn't just come in and start throwing off people immediately. I guess it's like saying if he had acted more like a dictator in support of the school's mission I would have said bravo, it was his intention to completely trash the entire mission statement of the school with his Tufts-inspired model while delaying an entire year, coupled with the dirty tricks, that makes me see him as a dictator who fake listens, stacks the deck, and does what he originally intended on doing in the first place. As an investigative journalist, I've been exposing too many of their lies to ever move into a trust mode, even if things work out all right.
Look at the image at the top of this forum - it is for me the quintessential image of the NAB, which I prefer to call the Names Building. Methinks Thom Mayne, forced to accommodate this names mania, thumbed his nose at the lot of them by carving his own initial into the front of the building. Could you imagine if all of these people honored Peter Cooper's vision (he didn't want The Union to be named after him), and the word "anonymous" appeared on every step, every classroom, every floor. Wouldn't that be a hoot!
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