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Founding of the Cooper Union
- When
- 1859
- Where
- Cooper Square, Manhattan
Peter Cooper founded the Cooper Union in 1859, establishing a private college in New York City dedicated to accessible education.
Cooper broke ground for the institution in 1853 and completed the building in 1859 at a cost of $600,000. The school was designed to offer education equal to the best technology schools, accessible to qualified individuals regardless of background. It began with night classes in applied sciences and day classes for women, drawing 2,000 responses to its initial offering, though 600 later dropped out.
Sources
- Cooper Union Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-04
- Peter Cooper Wikipedia, revision of 2026-06-30
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.