A Reply from the Sad Admissions Trombone
Free Cooper Union has received a series of letters from applicants and students accepted to Cooper Union’s Class of 2018. These are letters from students who say no to Cooper as a direct result of the decision to destroy the school’s mission of providing free education to all admitted students. As you read these letters, consider the impact of each loss not only to the Cooper community, but also to the students themselves, who have been denied an education entrusted to them because of mismanagement perpetrated by Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees.
We published the first of these letters yesterday, and will continue to do so each day, for as long as we have letters to post.
Today’s post is more than just a single letter. It’s documentation of an exchange that Billy, a School of Architecture applicant, had with an admission representative at Cooper Union. Billy sent a lengthy email to Cooper Union explaining why he was withdrawing his application. In the letter, he notes the rejection of the community-driven Working Group Plan— a tuition-free alternative to upholding the mission and vision of Cooper Union — as well as the prohibitive cost of tuition, the administration and trustees utter disregard for Cooper Union’s principles.
In a reply sent from Cooper’s admissions rep, Billy received an acknowledgement of his withdrawal, along with a note that simply says: “Womp womp”
Could this be the administration’s official response to students who say no to Cooper Union?
Here’s how it went down:
On Mar 7, 2014, at 11:34 AM, Erin Stahl wrote:
Hi Billy,
Your request has been received. No further action is required on your part.
Erin Stahl
Assistant Director of Admissions
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
30 Cooper Square New York, NY 10003
212-353-4272
estahl@cooper.eduOn 3/6/2014 3:11 PM, Cooper Admissions wrote:
Womp womp———— Original Message ————
Subject: Canceling Application
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 14:57:27 -0500
From: Billy
To: The Cooper Union “admissions@cooper.edu”Cooper Union Admissions:
I understand that the Architecture “Studio Test” was due on monday. I spent a lot of time on it, but I ended up making the decision two weeks ago to not finish it. For the last few years, Cooper Union has been my top choice for college. Over the summer, I visited the school with my brother. I fell in love with the school during the Architecture tour and was 100% sure that Cooper was where I wanted to spend the next 5 years of my life.
I, along with many other applicants, was praying that Cooper Union’s board would accept the working group’s plan to keep the school free. But when it was announced in January that the plan was rejected and that Cooper Union would stick to its original plan of charging tuition, I knew that my goal of attending Cooper Union was never going to happen. I worked on the home test in hopes that I would be one of those lucky “exceptional students” who would be given a merit scholarship, but I knew for a fact that there was little to no chance of me receiving one of those, anyway, so I stopped. It’s hard to find motivation to spent countless hours on something that you know will have no real benefit to you.
I understand that Cooper Union is extremely competitive (even with the large drop in the amount of applicants this year), and I’m not at all saying that I know for sure that I would get in, but it’s heartbreaking to have to give up on something you’ve been dreaming about for so long. Although many people would consider $20,000 to be a pretty inexpensive price tag for a school ranked so highly, the cost of living in New York along with all of those plane tickets to and from Atlanta makes the cost of attendance of close to $45,000/year extremely out of my reach.
From what I’ve heard, people don’t apply to Cooper Union just because it’s a “good school.” People apply to Cooper because it’s a good school that’s actually affordable, unlike almost every other school in the nation these days. People are willing to give up the luxuries of other institutions to attend Cooper because it doesn’t cause them to be in debt for the rest of their lives. If I’m gonna dish out $45,000/year to attend college and condemn myself to a lifetime of repaying student loans, I’m surely not going to pick a school with no recreation center, dining hall, guaranteed housing, or opportunities for a social life.
Due to the negative politics surrounding Cooper’s condition, the tension that will exist between the students at the school who do and don’t have to pay tuition, the extremely unaffordable cost of attendance, and the obvious disregard of the board to respect Cooper Union’s original mission, I am requesting that my application to Cooper Union be cancelled. Someday, I hope that Cooper Union will be able to once again become the institution that it once was.
Billy