It’s the last day of the year. I get to provide one more rant before the calendar page falls to the floor.

I am a proud graduate of Brooklyn Poly.  OK, it renamed itself the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.  But, everyone still called it Poly or Brooklyn Poly.

Oh- wait a little other history first.

Back in the early 1970s, NYU (New York University) had financial troubles.  The law school and the med school had money, but wouldn’t share it with the rest of the university.  So, NYU asked the State of New York to bail them out.  Governor Nelson Rockefeller approved the bailout- as long as NYU dumped its engineering school, ceding it to Brooklyn Poly (the best engineering school in the state) and NYU also was forced to sell its Bronx campus to the CIty University of New York.

As such, NYU was banned from offering engineering programs for years.  That’s also why Poly renamed itself the Polytechnic Institute of New York, to reflect the NYU Engineering Programs it had acquired. It eventually chose a moniker that I found hilarious- Polytechnic University of New York-  or, in my lingo, PUNY!

For its entire history, Brooklyn Poly catered to the lower middle class of New York.  (The bulk of its students came from Brooklyn Tech High School, with liberal additions from the other master schools of New York City.  Very few students came from outside the metro New York region. Even though I tried to recruit such students for it years later.)   It helped train very competent engineers.  When you finally left its halls, you knew how to do things, how to make things work.

One of my professors was kept on (this is a “Roy” opinion; I could never get a straight answer out of anybody) because he was famous- and was expected to leave the school some money.  Dr. Donald Othmer was one of the co-authors of the bible of Chemical Engineering- the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology.

When Dr. Othmer died, he left the school just a couple of thousand shares of stock.

Oh, I guess I should tell you that they weren’t just any stock- they were Berkshire Hathaway shares.  As a result, the endowment of Brooklyn Poly shot up from the barely over a $ 1 million to multi-millions.  Poly built a dormitory, upgraded its facilities, and helped create the MetroTech Center of New York (which, of course, is in Brooklyn).

And, then…

Now that we covered that…

NYU coveted the money that Don Othmer left Poly. (NYU is among the most profligate of American Universities. Even the WSJ says so.)  And, asked the state to reverse policies and let it take over Poly.  (Do you smell private equity asset stripping here?)  And, it did. In 2014.  Which yielded NYU plenty of money to build a new campus in Abu Dhabi. Or was it Shanghai?

So, you should not be surprised that I stopped being extremely active in the Poly Alumni group in 2014.  Before that I spent days trying to raise funds from the alumni in the DC area and recruit talented students to study at Poly.  (Amazingly- despite the paltry number of Poly grads in the DC area, we managed to raise as much money as they did in Metro NY.)

Given NYU tendencies,  it should not surprise you that Poly’s tuition more than trebled due to the takeover.  Which meant it could no longer be an avenue for the lower middle class to move on up.

So, when I found out that NYU has the dubious distinction of leaving its graduates in the worst financial state, I was not surprised. (This was reported by the Wall Street Journal recently.)  By almost every measure, NYU is the crowning criminal in leaving its graduate students and families deeply enmeshed in debt.  Its grad school alumni have abysmal salaries, despite the expensive tuitions they paid to achieve their degrees.

NYU parents and grad students have garnered $3.4 billion in Federal Plus Loans- just over the past decade.  That exceeds the amount for folks from any other public or private institution in the US. It proffers the lowest percentage of financial aid (62%) of any private school that has an endowment of $ 1 billion or more.  Hence, the Plus loans.  Where 40 of the 49 graduate programs NYU offers have the students owe more money in loans than they earn (two years out of school).  NYU grads had the highest debt loads for 15 of those programs.  NYU simply lacks the reputation of a  great  educational institution to merit such conditions.

By the way, in case you didn’t realize how little NYU cares about its student needs- its endowment is $5.8 billion, or about $82K per student.

Yeah. I miss the mission of Brookyn Poly.