Cooper Union Will Charge Grad Students Tuition

New York's celebrated arts and engineering college Cooper Union will charge tuition of its graduate students next year, while continuing to offer full scholarships to its undergraduates, president Jamshed Bharucha announced today.

The Greenwich Village school has been tuition-free for over 100 years, but due to a fiscal crisis that Bharucha unveiled shortly after taking office in July 2011, the possibility of charging affluent students tuition has been under consideration since the fall.

In an interview with the New York Times, Bharucha said that undergraduate students matriculating in September 2013 will receive four-year full tuition scholarships, but the school has not indicated whether subsequent classes will be charged.

Cooper Union has about 1,000 undergraduate students in its three schools—engineering, art and architecture—and fewer than 100 in master's degree programs in engineering and architecture.

A.i.A. interviewed Bharucha in November.