(no subject)
Apr. 24th, 2013 09:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretIn the inevitable conclusion to rumors and discussions swirling for the past year or two, my alma mater, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, has announced that it will begin charging undergraduate tuition in the fall of 2014. I am profoundly disappointed. I'm angry at the administration. I'm frustrated that no better solution can be reached. Mostly, like a lot of the facebook posts I saw this morning, I'm just sad.
Cooper's lack of tuition wasn't by any means the same thing as giving students scholarships. It was an incredible experiment in education. And it was a gift I am incredibly blessed to have received.
They interviewed an art student this morning on NPR and he talked about how it levelled the playing field. Nobody knew who was rich and who was poor, he said, it was all about the work. I think this was true in some senses, but also misleading. Most of my classmates didn't come from abject poverty, but they contrariwise mostly didn't come from extreme wealth. Mostly they were middle class kids like me. For all the talk of levelling the playing field, Cooper was not really all that diverse a place.
Cooper was a meritocracy in the crudest, most simple sense of the term. We got in on the basis of test scores and grades and some odd short answer questions, with affirmative action on the one hand and charity trips to third world countries on the other hand -all the other weird factors that are apparently important to the selection process at other elite schools- not really of interest to the selection staff. Their selection criteria had other complexities, but they all eventually boiled down to one theme: We are giving this person a gift, a free education. We are investing in their future. Do we think this person will be worth the investment? Do we think they will survive Cooper's academics? Do we think they will make use of their education when they graduate?
This thought process is fundamentally different than the process at a school that charges tuition. Charging tuition completely changes the way the administration thinks of accepting students. It completely changes the relationship between admissions staff and students. No longer are they thinking of students as people they're investing money and time in, but as people who are contracting with them to get an education.
And the lack of tuition also changed the way we thought of our education. In weird ways that I could have never predicted when I got accepted. I've spoken to students at other elite schools about how they approached overloading schedules and never have I met anyone where it worked like at Cooper. At most schools, you reach a point where if you add too many extra classes, you have to start paying extra. This imposes a behavioral economic limit on interest in overloads. At Cooper, the attitude began with the idea that we had been given this unique opportunity to engage in a quality educational process for a couple of years, and any classes that we could take and didn't were missed opportunities. I swear, there were classes I added to my schedule for no other reason than because if I didn't, all my friends would be busy doing the homework for the extra overload class and I'd have nothing to do. I may have been a lunatic at Cooper.
My Cooper education was mostly provided by excellent professors, but I even benefited immensely from the courses taught by bad professors because I was constantly surrounded by students who were also lunatics. Students who also believed in the Cooper experiment, that people with custodianship of the legacy of Peter Cooper had chosen us to give us a special opportunity to grow. When our teachers weren't teaching us, we taught ourselves. When we couldn't manage that, we worked together to fix the institution, because the institution was trusting us to continue its legacy. I learned so much about engineering and the process of learning from my classmates. I really can't remember a time when my classmates weren't as enthusiastic about learning as I was.
I hope Cooper can survive its financial trouble, I really do, and I hope that it will adapt to this new era and continue to provide a unique space for education in New York's East Village, for a kind of education that isn't offered anywhere else. And in the meantime, I am just sad for the end of an important experiment that I benefited from tremendously.
Today is the twenty ninth day of the Omer
Cooper's lack of tuition wasn't by any means the same thing as giving students scholarships. It was an incredible experiment in education. And it was a gift I am incredibly blessed to have received.
They interviewed an art student this morning on NPR and he talked about how it levelled the playing field. Nobody knew who was rich and who was poor, he said, it was all about the work. I think this was true in some senses, but also misleading. Most of my classmates didn't come from abject poverty, but they contrariwise mostly didn't come from extreme wealth. Mostly they were middle class kids like me. For all the talk of levelling the playing field, Cooper was not really all that diverse a place.
Cooper was a meritocracy in the crudest, most simple sense of the term. We got in on the basis of test scores and grades and some odd short answer questions, with affirmative action on the one hand and charity trips to third world countries on the other hand -all the other weird factors that are apparently important to the selection process at other elite schools- not really of interest to the selection staff. Their selection criteria had other complexities, but they all eventually boiled down to one theme: We are giving this person a gift, a free education. We are investing in their future. Do we think this person will be worth the investment? Do we think they will survive Cooper's academics? Do we think they will make use of their education when they graduate?
This thought process is fundamentally different than the process at a school that charges tuition. Charging tuition completely changes the way the administration thinks of accepting students. It completely changes the relationship between admissions staff and students. No longer are they thinking of students as people they're investing money and time in, but as people who are contracting with them to get an education.
And the lack of tuition also changed the way we thought of our education. In weird ways that I could have never predicted when I got accepted. I've spoken to students at other elite schools about how they approached overloading schedules and never have I met anyone where it worked like at Cooper. At most schools, you reach a point where if you add too many extra classes, you have to start paying extra. This imposes a behavioral economic limit on interest in overloads. At Cooper, the attitude began with the idea that we had been given this unique opportunity to engage in a quality educational process for a couple of years, and any classes that we could take and didn't were missed opportunities. I swear, there were classes I added to my schedule for no other reason than because if I didn't, all my friends would be busy doing the homework for the extra overload class and I'd have nothing to do. I may have been a lunatic at Cooper.
My Cooper education was mostly provided by excellent professors, but I even benefited immensely from the courses taught by bad professors because I was constantly surrounded by students who were also lunatics. Students who also believed in the Cooper experiment, that people with custodianship of the legacy of Peter Cooper had chosen us to give us a special opportunity to grow. When our teachers weren't teaching us, we taught ourselves. When we couldn't manage that, we worked together to fix the institution, because the institution was trusting us to continue its legacy. I learned so much about engineering and the process of learning from my classmates. I really can't remember a time when my classmates weren't as enthusiastic about learning as I was.
I hope Cooper can survive its financial trouble, I really do, and I hope that it will adapt to this new era and continue to provide a unique space for education in New York's East Village, for a kind of education that isn't offered anywhere else. And in the meantime, I am just sad for the end of an important experiment that I benefited from tremendously.
Today is the twenty ninth day of the Omer
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-24 02:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-24 03:02 pm (UTC)And while for some people, it was to try to graduate early or get a jump-start on grad school, for most of us we just ended up graduating with more credits than we needed.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-24 05:56 pm (UTC)That sounds weird to me. :(
I don't think MIT had that restriction, certainly I knew people who would sign up for a lot of classes and then take them, or sign up for a lot of classes and then drop them, or something in between, and I am not aware of them having any problems with the Administration in that regard. That's actually the first time I have heard of this restriction at all.
That said, special snowflakes all. No tuition definitely seemed like a part of Cooper's culture, in the way that our own brand of elitism was ours, so I am sorry that happened. :(
-ekate
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-24 05:57 pm (UTC)That sounds weird to me. :(
I don't think MIT had that restriction, certainly I knew people who would sign up for a lot of classes and then take them, or sign up for a lot of classes and then drop them, or something in between, and I am not aware of them having any problems with the Administration in that regard. That's actually the first time I have heard of this restriction at all.
n
That said, special snowflakes all. No tuition definitely seemed like an important part of Cooper's culture, so I am sorry that happened. :(
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-24 06:21 pm (UTC)No tuition was not Cooper's only unique feature (being supertiny and being located in the East Village were also key), but it was a really major part of our identity.