Private college again is set to go tuition-free

NEW YORK — A prestigious private college where Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama spoke when they were presidential candidates plans to reverse course and again become tuition-free for all undergraduates.

Trustees of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City approved a plan recently that aims to provide full tuition scholarships to all undergraduate students in 10 years. The cost of the plan will be offset by unspecified cuts and fundraising, the New York Times reported.

“If we exceed the financial targets in any given year, we may be able to accelerate the plan; if we don't meet the targets for any number of reasons, such as an economic downturn, we have builtin guardrails that allow us to slow the plan if necessary,” said Laura Sparks, Cooper Union's president, who took office in 2017.

Cooper Union was founded in 1859 by inventor and philanthropist Peter Cooper, who endowed the school to educate working-class New Yorkers without charge. Early in its history, some students who could afford to pay did so, but no undergraduates paid tuition for a century.

Cooper was “not a man who engaged in empty rhetoric,” the school says on its website. “He made his school free for the working classes. He took the revolutionary step of opening the school to women as well as men. There was no color bar at Cooper Union. Cooper demanded only a willingness to learn and a commitment to excellence.”

The school announced in 2013 that it would begin to charge tuition on a sliding scale, up to 50 percent of the annual bill, which was $43,250 this year.

The college has 853 undergraduate students and admits 13 percent of applicants.