Bharucha looks to the history of the amateur students as precedent for tuition and a means to create “access.” He defines access as “enabling students of merit to benefit from a fine education that would otherwise be out of reach.” There seems to be a suggestion in the administrative discourse that charging some students to fund other students would be a means of creating a level field, creating access. Others argue that Cooper’s meritocracy is what has created equal ground. The fear is that if tuition is implemented, and the school is reliant on a certain amount of revenue from tuition, Cooper Union then becomes dependent on a certain percentage of its students being able to pay. It appears that the original amateur classes were less about creating access for the poor than they were about allowing access for the wealthy, who were not held to the same rigorous standards as the students who attended for free.