I was in New York this past June on a college tour trip with my Filipino/Irish daughter, a high school senior whom one may describe as “flippish.” While we were in the city, we went into the Village and found our way to Momofuku, a trendy ramen noodle shop.
“I want to go to NYU,” my daughter said gleefully over a bowl of soup.
I told her if she did go there, she wouldn’t be eating at Momofuku much, but rather making her own .50 cent a packet ramen in a closet apartment shared with at least 3 people.
Of course, I’d help, but, at $60,000 tuition a year, the only thing four years at NYU seemed to guarantee was a degree in Indebtedness.
By coincidence, The New York Times did a follow-up story that same month on all the special financial perks that management and top academics were getting at the nonprofit research institution. The money seemed key to attracting and retaining top talent, though not necessarily the top teachers. Those types tended to be on contract, non-tenured and relatively perk-less.
The stories caused some alarm among NYU teachers, one of whom, Dr. Michael Rectenwald, posted this on his website:
“NYU students, parents and alumni should be especially sickened at these revelations. The cost of an NYU education is roughly $60,000 per year. NYU graduates are among the top student loan debtors in the nation, and thus, the world. Given its relatively paltry endowment, NYU cannot boast of generous student aid packages. These hundreds of millions of dollars could have gone to support financial aid packages for needy students, while supporting educational objectives, the likes of which the university is supposed to perform. Instead, the university has become a shell for a particular class, top administrators and their beneficiaries, the management class and a small bought-off faculty constituency.
Reading these reports might lead one to believe that NYU is home to a coddled, handsomely rewarded faculty, a knot of wriggling leeches living lavishly on the future debts of its students. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The reports refer to a tiny minority, and utterly miss the conditions attendant upon the vast majority of the faculty at NYU.
