NYU Tisch is a school of performing arts, generally regarded as being in the top five in the country. Would you think better of him if he were applying for Musical Theater instead of Art and Public Policy?
Not much. I thought the key point from NYU is that even the neediest students are going to have to come up with something like 40 grand a year to be in this program. What if the NYU official had simply said: “We don’t provide fee waivers for this program because even with maximum scholarships, students are obligated to come up with $40,000 per year, and thus we find it highly unlikely that a student requiring a $65 fee waiver would be able to matriculate even if admitted.”
If he ends up taking out $140k in Grad Plus loans for “art politics,” I hope someday he reflects back on that NYU person’s response.
As a parent of a Tisch grad, I can honestly say that I agree with the admissions person who made those comments was advising that student well. A student who cannot afford an application fee will certainly not be able to afford a program that costs $71,000. It is no secret that NYU is expensive. It was expensive when my D applied in 2002 and it has increased every year since. Anyone who is ignorant of that fact hasn’t been paying attention.
My D attended, and we paid for, a particular program at Tisch, but for most programs, it just isn’t worth it, in my opinion. When she applied, Tisch was the most expensive of NYU’s colleges, yet it wasn’t the most expensive of the schools that were on her list. For an Art and Public Policy master’s, I cannot imagine going into debt to that extent.
The appeal of NYU is that you get to live in the greatest city in the country, in a super-cool neighborhood, and get to do New York-y type things. Other than that, though, it’s like the DePaul of Chicago - it’s not the best school in the city, but it’s in the super-coolest neighborhood.
There is no program called art politics. It’s art and public policy and it’s a one year master’s.
Tisch is the best performing arts school in the city, however.
It isn’t uncommon for students with low-earning masters degrees and a large amount of debt to complain that someone should have given them better advice. This admission director tried to do that.
My oldest D works in higher ed consulting. She says most masters programs are a ripoff. There are a few industries where it is required for licensing and a few industries where there is “degree inflation” and it is useful in getting employment. You can get higher pay in some government jobs with a masters, too. But she says most masters program are just rainmaking for the colleges, and do little to enhance your employability or promotability over the same amount of good work experience.
Well, then there’s Julliard . . .
I’m not excusing NYU for being so expensive, but it is true that they have to pay their faculty and staff enough for them to live in the very high-cost NYC area. And land is expensive, building costs are high, and so on and so forth.
And I disagree with Cobrat that NYU was still thought of as a commuter school in the early '90s. I got an MBA from NYU Stern in 1981, and even then it was not a commuter school.
This falls under the heading “No good deed goes unpunished.” However, it is brilliant marketing by the applicant. He got the fee waiver…which NYU’s website says is impossible. If he doesn’t get admitted, he’ll probably claim it’s because NYU knew he couldn’t afford it. If admitted, he’ll probably get a better fin aid offer than he otherwise would. There’s a good chance he’ll use it to negotiate a better offer from some of the other programs he’s applying to.
VeryHappy, you’re right, but I was thinking more of theater.
The director’s advice was very pragmatic and almost certainly did the applicant a favor. Probably shouldn’t have documented it in an e-mail. Too easy for these things to go viral in the current environment.
As evidenced by the tweet in reaction to the advice: right on schedule and every word predictable from the lexicon characteristic of this year’s “list of demands” climate.
Unfortunate that the director was maybe not keeping current on recent events in the higher ed / social activism space to see how the worm has turned, as far as who swings the bigger stick. S/he walked straight into a buzzsaw.
I should have said for undergrad as their graduate programs…especially professional programs like MBAs at NYU-Stern were already drawing a national and to some extent, international students.
However, according to several NYU undergrad alums who graduated as late as the early 1980’s, it still was perceived as a commuter school by NYC/Tri-state locals and undergrad classmates during their undergrad years. Was also substantially less expensive and NYU catered more to middle and lower-income students back then.
For the latter(undergrad), it’s more for reasons of having a reasonably “acceptable” academic safety for the children who don’t have the stats or the inclination to gain admission to and/or attend the academically reputable/elite private universities or LACs…especially those in the NE.
Up until the late '80s, NYU undergrad(except Stern and Tisch) tended to be regarded as only marginally better than the CUNYs during a period when the latter’s academic reputation was near/at their lowest point and SES less desirable than now because it had a higher proportion of lower-middle class and lower-income students. That started changing quickly sometime in the mid-late '80s according to older NYU alums I knew from those SES groups and they’re not very happy about it.
NYU’s current perceptions and desirability among the uberrich in the national/international student community is a very recent phenomenon which started with aggressive and effective marketing campaigns started in the 1990’s.
One visible sign of this is the extensive renovations of older dorms and the building of newer ones like the one on Union Square within the last 15 or so years which astounded one older friend in his late '50s coming back to visit NYC after being away for 2+ decades when he said “My goodness, that’s not a dorm! That’s a luxury hotel!!”
Tisch offers a one-year MA in “Arts Politics” (not art politics, as I said above). Presumably this is what the student was seeking. http://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/ma-in-arts-politics
No good deed shall go unpunished!
The admission director was too honest. He should just say no to the request and no more.
NYU is a private school and can charge whatever it wants to.
Sure, there are people who want to attend NYU because of it’s location. Just like S’s friend who attends an expensive school in Florida because the location appeals to him. Or D’s friend who attended a school in California because he wanted to be in California. I don’t see any difference.
As long as you can afford it, fine. If you expect a free ride from the expensive school and feel that you deserve it because you ae a member of an “oppressed” group, forget it.
Some of the anger from lower-middle class/low-income New Yorkers and the older NYU undergrad alums is due to the fact NYU did at one time catered more towards lower-middle class and lower income students in the NYC/Tri-State areas like themselves and from the mid-'80s on felt the institution turned its back completely on them in order to glitz themselves up to be a competitive member of the Ivy/elite U club.
The feeling from the older generation of NYU undergrad alums and to some extent some New Yorkers and Tri-staters is that NYU broke its commitment to be “A Private University in the Public Service”. Worse, they were directly implicated by then NY DA Andrew Cuomo in one private loan steering scandal some years back which factored into the ginormous student debt by some NYU graduates.
In addition, they are also driving up rental rates as they bought out many buildings in lower Manhattan and in the process, caused the evictions of many lower-middle class and low-income tenants. A few lower-income HS classmates and their families were among their victims in the late '90s.
In that context, I don’t feel one can blame some New Yorkers for feeling sore at NYU or for feeling that NYU owes them for all that BS.