Cooper Union will end its legacy of offering free admission to accepted students after a vote Friday rejected a plan to stave off a proposed $20,000 tuition.
According to Inside Higher Ed, Cooper Union's Board of Trustees voted Friday against a plan to keep the college free proposed by a working group made up of students, alumni, staff and trustees.
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science Art, located in Manhattan, NY's East Village, was founded in order to provide education to the working middle class. An industrialist, Paul Cooper wanted a school that would train engineers, artists and architects. The school was free, but had an acceptance rate of eight percent as recently as 2010.
"I will miss the Cooper Union I went to," Kevin Slavin, a trustee attempting to keep the school free, wrote in a Facebook post after the vote. "And I'll try to get it back, and for the record, some of the Trustees in that room are serious about that too. But not today. Today I'm just going to mourn it, and say how grateful I am to everyone for giving me the chance to fight for its survival."
The plan to start charging tuition at Cooper Union was announced in April, Inside Higher Ed reported, and it immediately incited a student occupation of the president's office. To end the occupation, the school administration announced a "good faith effort" to try and avoid the tuition proposal.
In Dec., the working group released its report with the same goal, suggesting making budget cuts and raising revenue in different ways, rather than by charging tuition. Despite opposition saying $20,000 for tuition would crush Cooper Union, administrators dismissed the working group's proposal.
"The Working Group plan puts forward a number of recommendations that are worth pursuing under any financial model," the Board of Trustees said in a statement Friday. "However, we believe that the contingencies and risks inherent in the proposals are too great to supplant the need for new revenue sources. Regrettably, tuition remains the only realistic source of new revenue in the near future."
Barry Drogin, a working group member and Cooper alumni, told Inside Higher Ed he does not know what the school's mission is, but acknowledged it clearly has a financial plan.
"I don't know what the mission of the college is right now," Drogin said. "It's something. It was my understanding that you're supposed to create a mission then create a financial plan to meet the mission."
Felix Salmon wrote an op-ed for Reuters following the vote condemning Cooper's decision to no longer offer free tuition.
"This is not going to work. What's more, the trustees have to know, in their heart of hearts, that it is not going to work," he wrote. "Something which is romantic and beautiful when it's free becomes simply shabby if you start trying to charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for it. The current students know it, the current faculty know it, and prospective students certainly know it: already applications to Cooper have plunged."
