<p>There was an article on 4/4 in the NY Times about Parsons getting rid of quite a few faculty members in the fine arts department. Does anyone know anything about Parsons' endowment, or their financial stability? It seems that now we have to worry about the financial health of these schools as well as our own... and how we're going to foot the bill!</p>
<p>designermom, from a letter rec'd recently from The New School (my D is a student at Lang/Parsons)</p>
<p>The Board of Trustees has approved tuition for 2009/2010 see:
2009</a> - 2010 Tuition Fee and Schedule</p>
<p>…institutional financial aid to students has increased and the university plans to increase the financial aid by nearly $9 million additional dollars for 2009/2010.</p>
<p>…we have limited our tuition increases to 4.5% across the university. This represents the smallest increase in recent history. By comparison the average increase for private colleges and universities nationally this past year, as reported by the College Board, was 5.9%.</p>
<p>Doesn't look too terrible to me. Do you go to their website and probe around?</p>
<p>I’m also wondering about the impact of the firings. I actually read a wire service story in a local small town paper far away from The New School. It was about the protests, and did not give much information.</p>
<p>I immediately went to the NY Times website and was able to find lots of related articles, none of which made me feel any better about the firings. They seem to be in the Design School. I’m not so worried about how this impacts the overall financial package for my child, but rather how this will affect her overall education. I know discord between administration and staff are not new, but firing 25% of the teaching staff?</p>
<p>If anyone has any insight, I’d love to hear it. The New School has not posted anything on their website.</p>
<p>Having just received the cost of the first year of college and the financial assistance offer, I just want to make sure that all is well for Parsons.</p>
<p>I imagine that morale is low there among the teachers… they had a near-unanimous vote of no confidence in their president, John Kerrey. That was on Dec. 10, before the faculty firings began. This is from a New School University blog, a response to the NYTimes article about the situation:</p>
<p>[<a href=“http://www.newnewschooluniversity.blogspot.com%5D%5B/url”>www.newnewschooluniversity.blogspot.com][/url</a>]</p>
<p>"The current concerns of faculty have nothing to do with the current financial situation of the university. The concerns of the faculty with the actions of the President’s Office predate the current economic downturn. The faculty of the New School, as a not-wealthy institution, are accustomed to operating in lean ways. If anything, the faculty’s current concerns are about the ways in which the inability of the President to function productively with any sort of Provost have been the single greatest obstacle to the faculty developing fundable research initiatives and new degree programs in areas likely to see an increase in enrollment during periods of economic downturn.</p>
<p>The current concerns of the faculty have nothing to do with the conditions of tenure at the New School, as they have been established in the handbook developed in consultation with the faculty over the last year. If there is a concern in this area, it has to do with the turnover of Provosts, whose key function is making recommendations to the President about tenure cases. That Kerrey decided to unilaterally make himself as President also the Chief Academic Officer evidences how little he understands about the position of Provost and the issue of tenure."</p>