For Christine Baranski, the most evocative space at the Juilliard School isn’t a black box theater or a rehearsal room where she cut her teeth as an actor. “I get really emotional when I set foot in the elevator,” she says with a sigh. She remembers its “new car smell” when she rode it in the early 1970s, as part of the third class to ever study in the drama school. And she remembers, just as viscerally, the people she rode in it with. “I was in the elevator once with Leonard Bernstein, with Martha Graham, George Balanchine,” she says. “I was in the elevator once with Maria Callas.”

If you know anything about Juilliard, it’s probably that it is where some of our greatest artists learned to be great. The school, established in 1905 as the Institute of Musical Art in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, has long given students world-class training in their chosen discipline: dance, drama, or music. Last September the drama department’s MFA program went tuition-free, as the Yale School of Drama had a few years before. Now—and this is why we gathered some celebrated alumni for a portrait backstage at the school’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater—Juilliard has announced that it intends to go entirely tuition-free. For every student. The great work has already begun. Starting this fall, 40 percent of Juilliard students will attend the institution at no cost.

Reaching the school’s ultimate goal will take serious fundraising, but other elite educational institutions are increasingly thinking along the same lines. (Harvard College, for instance, announced that it will be tuition-free for families with incomes of under $200,000.) Since he became Juilliard’s president in 2018, Damian Woetzel, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, has worked to make the school accessible to all students, not only increasing financial aid but also designating several programs tuition-free already. Juilliard currently costs north of $50,000—not including room and board—and more than 95 percent of the students already receive some support from the school. “The overall goal is to move steadily more tuition-free—to that ultimate place—and make sure that talent is the opportunity, not the ability to pay for it,” Woetzel says.

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That opportunity is hard to come by. Juilliard’s Drama Division typically accepts 18 students a year—8 to 10 undergraduate students and 8 to 10 graduate students—making it one of the most competitive and sought-after drama programs in the world. Even Baranski had a tough time getting in. “They put me on a waiting list in the spring,” she says. It wasn’t because she showed a lack of promise: “They thought that the space between my teeth might’ve been causing a sibilant s,” she says. “Over the summer, I had dental work.” After capping her teeth and taking speech therapy classes, Baranski reauditioned for the speech teacher and the Drama Division’s artistic director, Oscar winner John Houseman. “I did a paragraph that was filled with nothing but s-words,” she recalls. It must have done the trick, because the moment the speech teacher signed off, Houseman accepted her on the spot. To this day, Baranski says, it’s “one of the most moving moments of my life.”

Jessica Chastain calls Juilliard her “home away from home.” The Northern California native studied at the school in the early aughts, immersing herself in roles like Arkadina in The Seagull and honing the craft that would eventually win her an Oscar. “When you’re training, you have no idea what little seeds you’re planting and growing inside of you—how it’s going to develop into your career,” Chastain says. The first from her family to attend college, she struggled to afford tuition, particularly on top of the hair-raising cost of living in New York City. “I was so stressed out about money,” she says. She worked part-time in the library and the student affairs office on her lunch breaks and took out loans—“a lot” of them—to get by. “I couldn’t even afford to go to a restaurant. So it was all the cafeteria,” she says. Asked how the food was, she winces. “I mean, it’s a cafeteria,” she quips.

After Chastain received the Robin Williams Scholarship, which covered the last two years of her four-year degree, she could breathe more freely. “Having that cushion was like, Okay, I can finish,” she says. “I can get my degree. I’ll still be in debt, but I won’t be consumed and overwhelmed by it.”

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Danielle Brooks had to pay full tuition when she left South Carolina for Juilliard. “I did not have the scholarship money,” she says. “My parents had to refinance our home for me to come here.” Even that wasn’t enough. “Unfortunately, my godmother had passed away and, to my surprise, left me $20,000 in her will. That was what helped me to start my first semester at Juilliard.”

Brooks made it through the program, starring in productions like A Raisin in the Sun and Clybourne Park while working multiple front-desk jobs at the school, which she stuck with after graduation. “I remember nights of crying right after I graduated,” she says. “Not having the money and working all these odd jobs, trying to pay for college.” Brooks is now a Tony-and Oscar-nominated actor for the stage and screen versions of The Color Purple. “My cheeks hurt from the joy of surviving this place,” she says.

Jon Batiste talks in terms of survival too. He moved to Manhattan from New Orleans to study music at Juilliard in 2004. He was 17. Musically, he felt “very prepared” but describes the transition to living in the city as “very much a learning curve.” He remembers “surviving New York City, surviving the limitless options that are presented to you as an artist that’s trying to discover who they are.” Now a new member of Juilliard’s board of trustees—and the winner of seven Grammys—he’s come to believe that it’s the institution’s responsibility to provide a space where the students can wholly commit to their chosen passion with as little stress as possible. “There’s enough in trying to sing the perfect aria or to play in the jazz band,” he says. “There’s so many summits that you have to climb before you can reach the level of greatness that everybody who comes here inevitably wants to reach.”

BATISTE LOVES THE IDEA OF JUILLIARD REMOVING SOME PRESSURE: “THERE’S ENOUGH IN TRYING TO SING THE PERFECT ARIA OR TO PLAY IN THE JAZZ BAND. THERE’S SO MANY SUMMITS THAT YOU HAVE TO CLIMB.”

There are setbacks along the way, of course. “I was unbelievably bad in a production here,” says Laura Linney. “I was distracted. I knew I was bad. It was brutally painful.” So painful, she says, that she decided to walk away from the school altogether. Then an acting teacher took her aside and taught her the most important lesson she’d ever learn at Juilliard: “He said, ‘This is where you’re supposed to fail. You’ll never learn until you learn how to fail.’ ” Now the four-time Emmy winner is a vice chair of Juilliard’s board. “I’ve never left again.”

How do the alums feel about future students getting a free ride? “Give me my money back,” Brooks deadpans. “Y’all owe me.” Chastain says that removing the barrier of paying tuition is a “great equalizer” for aspiring artists. If the children of wealthy families have a built-in advantage, she says, “then the whole industry is populated with privilege.” In her opinion, that doesn’t always make for the most vital art: “Those aren’t the stories that I necessarily think we should focus on and tell.”

Money will always be a factor in the life of an artist—it’s a famously precarious profession after all. But with a tuition-free arts education, students can focus on collaboration rather than starvation. At the shoot, Brooks and her old friend Batiste talked about working together when they studied drama and music here. “We were thinking about MLK Day and the performances we used to put on,” she says. “We were all just creating together.”

For this portrait, the veterans were joined by Kayla Mak, a current Juilliard student and dancer with American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company, and Tony Siqi Yun, an award-winning classical pianist and recent Juilliard grad. Batiste, who’s stationed next to a grand piano, couldn’t help but improvise with whatever song came next on the playlist. Soon enough, Brooks was riffing along with Batiste in perfect harmony and Baranski was cooing melodious oohs and ahhs. By the end of the shoot, Batiste and Yun had spontaneously begun playing the four-hand arrangement of Beethoven’s virtuosic “Appassionata” sonata. “We had an impromptu jam on that,” Batiste says later. He’s already charting Yun’s path forward: “He is going to pick up the baton,” Batiste says. “He doesn’t just want to star in the world—he also wants to build it.”