How Tuition Hurts Colleges
Felix Salmon wrote a really worthwhile piece [http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/12/05/occupy-cooper-union/] during the Free Cooper Union occupation discussing — among other things — exactly how Cooper Union’s academic reputation and since-forever no-tuition policy are intertwined:
Cooper has a lot of adjuncts and a very small tenured faculty, and if you ask anybody associated with the school how it keeps its quality high, they’ll tell you that it’s a function of the enormous pool of applicants. The idea is that Cooper is extremely good at identifying America’s most talented teenagers, and can basically get its pick of the crop thanks to its free-tuition policy.If Cooper Union’s reputation comes from its students, then, and its ability to draw students derives from its
It doesn’t really matter whether that’s empirically true or not; what’s certain is that Cooper’s exceptionalism is an article of faith among both students and faculty, and that it is deeply rooted in the school being free.
