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    Stephen Adams, Who Made Yale Music School Tuition-Free, Dies at 86

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    A billionaire businessman and a late-blooming piano aficionado, he set a record with the anonymous $100 million gift that he and his wife gave the school.Stephen Adams, a billionaire whose anonymous $100 million gift to the Yale School of Music granted a tuition-free education to talented students embarking on careers in a capricious profession, died on March 14 at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 86.His death was confirmed by his wife, Denise (Rhea) Adams.Mr. Adams, who graduated from Yale College in 1959, was not a musician himself. But after he turned 55 and was already a prosperous business executive and wine collector, he became an amateur piano player.In 1999, he marked his class’s 40th-anniversary reunion by donating $10 million to the music school — the largest contribution it had ever received. Six years later, he and his wife surpassed that record when they made their $100 million gift, anonymously.They did not publicly reveal their identity as the donors until 2008, when Mr. Adams was asked to confirm their contribution by an interviewer from Wine Spectator magazine. He agreed to do so then, he said, to spur other contributors as his 50th-anniversary class reunion approached.“My wife and I are Christians, and the Bible speaks of giving in secret,” Mr. Adams told The Yale Daily News in 2009.In that same article, Michael Friedmann, a professor of theory and chamber music, said, “Musicians, as opposed to doctors or lawyers, are not in a position to repay educational loans easily, and the profession has a capricious opportunity structure.” He added, “The new financial conditions at the school, however, put musicians in a very different position in relation to their post-Yale careers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Juilliard’s Top-Tier Graduate Acting Program Is Going Tuition-Free

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      Starting with the next academic year, the drama school will eliminate an “unrealistic burden” for graduate acting students.The Juilliard School, one of the world’s most elite conservatories, is making its top-notch graduate acting program tuition-free.School officials said they hoped that the move would make the drama division accessible to a broader array of students, and that it would make it easier for graduates to pursue careers in the arts because they will have less debt.“There’s a mythology around a place with a name like Juilliard, and I know too many people who didn’t apply because they thought, ‘I couldn’t afford it,’” said Damian Woetzel, the school’s president. “We recognize that talent is so much greater than opportunity.”Juilliard’s drama division, in which undergraduate and graduate acting students train together, was (once again) declared the best in the nation by The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. The school’s alumni have included Robin Williams, Jessica Chastain, Adam Driver and Viola Davis.The acting program’s Master of Fine Arts track, established in 2012, is relatively new; previously, postgraduate acting students received a credential called simply a diploma. The master’s degree program, which currently has 35 students, is a four-year program — one year longer than most — and the fourth year has always been tuition-free to keep Juilliard competitive with three-year programs elsewhere.Juilliard’s tuition, for both undergraduates and graduates, is $53,300 per year. About 90 percent of undergraduate students receive some financial aid.“The expense of being educated these days is an unrealistic burden, particularly for young artists,” the actress Laura Linney, who is a Juilliard alumna and the vice chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees, said in an interview. “Members of my class were paying debt into their 40s. That doesn’t encourage young people to go into the arts.”Tuition for all graduate acting students will be free starting with the next academic year. To eliminate tuition, the school said it had raised $15 million, with key gifts from the commercial theater producers Stephanie P. McClelland and John Gore.McClelland, a Juilliard trustee, has been credited as a producer on 87 Broadway shows over the last two decades; she donated with her husband, Carter McClelland, a longtime Wall Street executive. Gore is a British producer whose many ventures include the touring behemoth Broadway Across America and the website Broadway.com. Other gifts, and existing scholarship funds, were combined to permanently replace tuition revenue.“Many of our M.F.A. students come in with significant undergraduate debt, and some have maxed out the federal loans they can take,” said Evan Yionoulis, the dean of Juilliard’s drama division. This will “allow them to be here without that financial weight on their shoulders, and allow them the freedom, when they graduate, to make choices to build their craft and to have the patience it takes to build their career.”Juilliard’s move comes two years after Yale University made its drama school, which is also top-ranked and is larger than Juilliard’s, tuition-free with a $150 million gift from David Geffen. James Bundy, the dean of what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama, said the waiving of tuition had already had a significant impact at Yale.“We’ve seen a rise in applications — we’ve had the two highest years in the school’s history, which tells me that a great many more people saw the school as financially accessible,” Bundy said. “We’ve had a substantial increase in the portion of the applicant pool that identified as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. And taking tuition out of the equation has enabled us to increase stipends for living expenses for students with need, which has the long-term impact of driving down indebtedness.”Juilliard already has several other tuition-free programs, including the drama division’s two-year playwriting program, which currently has eight students, as well as several specialized music programs. Once the graduate acting program goes tuition-free, 26 percent of all Juilliard students will pay no tuition to attend.But many music and dance students, as well as drama undergraduates, will continue to have some tuition obligations; the graduate acting program is going tuition-free now because there were donors who stepped forward to make that possible.“My aim is to make the school tuition-free — the ultimate artistic education deserves that access,” Woetzel said. “Wouldn’t that be something?” More

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      Yale Drama Goes Tuition-Free With $150 Million Gift From David Geffen

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      Starting in August, the drama school plans to eliminate tuition for returning and future students, removing a barrier to entry for low-income students and those worried about debt.The billionaire David Geffen is giving $150 million to Yale School of Drama, allowing one of the nation’s most prestigious programs to stop charging tuition.The graduate school, which enrolls about 200 students in programs that include acting, design, directing and playwriting, announced the gift on Wednesday, and said it would rename itself the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.Yale said it believes the gift is the largest in the history of American theater.The school said that, starting in August, it would eliminate tuition for all returning and future students in its masters, doctoral and certificate programs. Tuition at the school had been $32,800 per year.The move should remove a barrier to entry for low-income students and those worried about incurring high student debt before entering an often low-paying field.“We know, because people have told us, that there are potential applicants out there who think they could never afford graduate theater training at an Ivy League school,” said James Bundy, the drama school dean. He said he hoped that by going tuition-free, that obstacle would diminish.He also said that he hoped that the move would lessen the impact of student debt on the career choices graduates make.“By reducing the debt burden of the average student, we create more resilient artists and managers who are able to make braver artistic choices — they’re able to take that downtown play and they don’t have to have a career selling real estate on the side,” he said. “Not every artist is going to break through at the age of 25 or 26 or 27. Certain kinds of careers take time to build, and entering the professions with less debt is going to make for more interesting and more resounding choices in the long run.”The drama school is home to the Yale Repertory Theater, and its graduates include Meryl Streep, Lynn Nottage and Lupita Nyong’o.It will become the second program at Yale to eliminate tuition; in 2005 the Yale School of Music did so. There are a handful of other tuition-free graduate programs around the country, including N.Y.U.’s medical school.The university’s president, Peter Salovey, said he hoped more schools would follow, particularly in the areas of nursing and public health, where students tend to graduate with high debt and pursue careers that are not highly lucrative.“In general, what should be happening in higher education is an attempt to reduce the financial burden on individuals and families associated with undergraduate education and graduate and professional education,” Salovey said. “I’d love to do this for other programs as well, but it will take the generosity of donors to make it happen.”Geffen, 78, made his fortune in the music and film businesses, and is currently worth about $10 billion, according to Forbes. He has become a major philanthropist with an interest in the arts, previously giving $150 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, $100 million to Lincoln Center for the renovation of the concert hall where the New York Philharmonic performs and $100 million to the Museum of Modern Art.Geffen, through a Yale spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed, but Salovey said the Yale gift came about after years of conversations between the university and Geffen’s foundation. Geffen once taught a seminar at Yale, in the late 1970s, about the music industry, and Salovey said that experience had been positive for Geffen; Salovey also said the university had been aware of Geffen’s interest in supporting higher education and the arts, and had looked for projects that might appeal to those interests.Geffen has maintained a variety of connections to theater throughout his career: In the 1980s, he was among the producers of the original Off Broadway production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” and in the 1990s, he gave the founding gift for the Geffen Playhouse, a major theater in Los Angeles. Over the years he has been credited as a producer of nine Broadway shows, from “Dreamgirls” to the upcoming revival of “The Music Man.”Salovey said he hopes in the future that Yale will be able to build a new theater that will also house the drama school; that project would have to be financed through a separate fund-raising effort, he said. More