On June 7, 2024, the University of the Arts closed so suddenly that there was barely time for a whimper and no time for an explanation. It had charged the going rate of a private arts college — better than $50,000 a year — and sent its graduates into fields that rarely covered the cost. The University’s bills came due faster than the money did, and UArts went into bankruptcy.
The same economics followed its graduates out the door. A theater graduate, for example, would spend more than 20 percent of a first year’s pay on student loans alone. A computer science graduate with a similar debt would pay less than 10 percent in that first year and every year after. The phrase is “starving artist.” No one ever coined one for the computer scientist.
A few blocks apart on Broad Street, the Avenue of the Arts, two buyers answered the question institutional death raises. What to do with the buildings? Rebuild along traditional lines, with programs and degrees, or use the moment to rethink how young artists are supported.
Temple bought the tower at Broad and Walnut, Terra Hall. Temple’s answer was to rebuild. It plans to bring a working university back to where the old one stood and carry on.
Scout, a development and design firm, bought Hamilton Hall, the school’s iconic columned building, and the dormitory behind it. Its answer was different. It’s turning the building into studios and the dormitory into 45 apartments with subsidized rent for people who make art for a living. No tuition, no degree at the end. Call it a post-university campus. It tests an old idea: An artist makes better work when the buyer is in the room or near it.
Temple’s bet is to rebuild, but that costs money. A university is not just buildings. It is advisers, faculty, financial-aid offices, libraries, and networks. It recently announced its solution to these expenses. Beginning in 2027, it will require most of its first-year students to live on its North Philadelphia campus. Its stated reasons are retention, community, and a better first year, and those reasons are real. Required first-year housing is common; Penn, Drexel, and Penn State all have some version of it. But Temple is also facing a projected $85 million deficit. John Fry, its president, calls layoffs “inevitable.” A required bed is billed as room and board, and room and board can be booked as revenue.
Balancing the books by increasing a student’s debt begins a young life by charging rent on it, with nothing to show but a bill.
The room-and-board bill lands on the student. In-state tuition runs above $20,000 a year, and room and board adds nearly $20,000 more. This is one way to cover a deficit. Book the new revenue now. Push the cost — renovations, new buildings — into the capital budget, where it comes due over decades. As Fry told his faculty, the Terra Hall renovation will be funded by “allocations specifically earmarked for capital projects,” separate from the operating budget where the deficit lives. That will work whether or not it improves anyone’s first year.
We’ve seen this before. At Drexel, when Fry was president, he grew the campus and required first- and second-year students to live in it, the cost landing on students in rent and loans. Drexel now is trimming $150 million from its budget, laying off staff, and closing its nearly 200-year-old Academy of Natural Sciences museum to the public.
Balancing the books by increasing a student’s debt begins a young life by charging rent on it, with nothing to show but a bill. Scout provides an alternative, not as a replacement for the degree, but as a better place to use what one knows.
Let’s consider reversing the order — drop the required first-year residency and offer instead an optional fourth year spent in the kind of environment Scout has built — after the craft is learned, when the one thing left to learn is how to live by it. Students would live cheaply, sell what they make, and practice the hardest part of an artist’s life before the loans come due.
We ran a version of this at UArts, in the Center for the Creative Economy — workshops and small grants that taught artists the business of their work, though never the living-and-making piece Scout could add. Students left with a plan, not just a portfolio and a bill.
I worked at UArts and watched it die. Whether Scout’s version, or some version of it, will work, no one can say. But I would rather bet on the people making things in the studios than on the ones paying, on credit, to sit in the rebuilt version of what just died. Temple requires a bed and bills the person using it. Scout hands makers a cheap room and asks them to make what they can.
Neil Kleinman is a professor emeritus of entrepreneurship at the University of the Arts and former director of its Center for the Creative Economy, which taught artists to make a living from their work. He also served as dean of its College of Media and Communication and as vice president for academic affairs at Stockton State College.
THE LAST JOURNEY OF UARTS
