The newly created School of the Arts Endowment Fund will generate needed resources for scholarships and student production/exhibition support—cornerstones of the Purchase College program in the performing and visual arts.

The School of the Arts Gala offers you the opportunity to create a named, endowed fund for the arts or to help build a general arts endowment fund for Purchase College students.

Why are scholarships needed?

Endowed scholarships in the arts will encourage more talented and ambitious students to pursue professional careers in the performing and visual arts (risky career choices, financially speaking), help keep a public higher education in the arts within reach of low-income students, and enable Purchase College to compete more effectively with other, better-endowed conservatories and schools for top young talent.

Purchase College is a gateway of educational opportunity. Thirty-one percent of our students are the first in their families to attend college and 25 percent come from families earning less than $15,000 a year. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Education designated Purchase as an institution with an unusually high percentage of needy students.

The financial burden of higher education is particularly challenging for our arts students, who cannot bank on lucrative careers to help them repay student loans and other college debts. Further, the excellence of our arts programs attracts many students from out-of-state and overseas, who must pay a much higher State University of New York tuition.

Our average scholarship award is $1,713 per year, which falls far short of the amount needed for the annual tuition of $4,350 for New York State residents and $10,610 for those from out-of-state. In fact, the projected cost of attending Purchase is nearly $18,000 a year (including living expenses and educational supplies), and the average financial need per student per year is just over $8,500. One-hundred percent of incoming students need one or more loans to help them finance the cost of their education.

Arts students, in particular, must shoulder some additional costs. Visual artists, film students, and scenic/costume designers face significant expenses for supplies (up 33 percent from last year); dancers must stay in top physical condition and so cannot take time from classes to hold jobs during summers and school breaks; musicians must take private lessons, (the heart of a music education), which are not included in the base tuition, adding an additional $2,000 per year to their expenses.

Why is funding for productions and exhibitions so important?

Staging performances and mounting exhibitions are essential to the training of art conservatory students and a key factor in their professional success. The cost of such elements as technical preparation, props and lighting, costumes, musical score rights, scripts, performance rights, exhibition installation, and marketing are not provided by the support we receive from the State of New York.

Currently, each conservatory actively raises funds for its shows and productions each year. Without the stable, predictable source of income an endowment provides, they are unable to rely upon a guaranteed resource in planning each coming year’s performances. The School of the Arts Endowment will begin to mitigate this challenge by generating a baseline of support for annual production expenses year in and year out.

Private income from the School of the Arts Endowment will enable students to work with professional guest directors, musicians, conductors and choreographers, and mount productions now beyond their reach.

The Purchase College School of the Arts now produces more than 175 public concerts and exhibitions for audiences in Westchester and Fairfield Counties. Many are fully staged in the College’s Performing Arts Center, and the School is increasingly appearing in venues in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Our dancers also have a presence overseas.

As an example consider:

The annual Purchase College opera production is a true collaborative among the Purchase Symphony Orchestra, the Voice program, and the Design/Technology program of the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film. It may include the Conservatory of Dance whenever a production calls for dancing. More than 200 students may participate in this production in a year. On average, the opera costs $30,000 per year to produce. Costs for a fully staged theatre production will range from $12,000 to $20,000, including marketing.

The Purchase Opera has now won the prestigious National Opera Association’s award for the best college production two years in a row, and Professor Jacque Trussel, head of Voice, is Classical Singer’s 2005 Director of the Year.

The Purchase Dance Corps’ concerts in the College’s Performing Arts Center have a budget of about $60,000, including rights of choreography, rehearsal directors, staging and lighting, and marketing. The Purchase Repertory Theatre offers a varied repertory of seven student theatre productions and events in New York City and in Los Angeles on an annual basis. We are able to secure guest theatre directors for fees that range from $5,000 to $7,000.

For more information or to make a gift:

Purchase College School for the Arts Gala
c/o Paint the Town Red
Attn. Haley Schaefer
62 West 45th Street, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10036

Tele: (212) 677-3173 x235

Or:

Office of External Affairs and Development
Durst Humanities Bldg., 2064
Purchase College, State University of New York
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577-1400

Tele: (914) 251-6040