Oct. 27th Town Hall Meeting

The New School had a Town Hall meeting on Wednesday, October 27^th. Students, faculty and staff filled up Wollman Hall for the presentation led by New School President David Van Zandt and New School provost Tim Marshall.

The meeting started out with a presentation, with Marshall and Van Zandt highlighting the successful switch to Gmail accounts, and displayed their new bell schedule which should be debuting in the fall of 2012. The presentation took a turn to the less cheerful side when the subject of enrollment and money was brought up. The trend of modest enrollment growth was unexpected, as the school had been dealing with rapid growth for some time.

The trend was slightly disturbing, because the New School had budgeted for a full expansive enrollment for 2011, but only accepted 22 more students than they had the previous year. This slight improvement wasn’t what the administration had expected, as the New School is a tuition dependent school; the majority of their money comes from the enrollment of the students.

President Van Zandt pointed to his long term goal of trying to keep the tuition from raising over the next few years, saying that “we could lower the cost of tuition” but that the students’ experience would be drastically altered. Van Zandt finished up by saying that this trend wasn’t unusual considering that the economy has been rough for everybody. He also pointed to the fact that the New School was in much better shape that a lot of other school's, pointing to the fact that the New School has stayed out of the "red" in terms of deficit.