January 8, 2009
Looking back at universities during other economic crises
Editor’s note: Stephen Warren, professor of atmospheric sciences and Earth & Space Sciences, sent University Week this brief study he did of how universities coped with the Great Depression. We publish it here with his permission.
Universities During the Great Depression, 1929-1935
By Stephen Warren
In a time of economic difficulty, it seems appropriate to inquire about how the universities endured the depression of the 1930s. I found two books on this topic at Suzzallo Library. Although they do not present information specific to the University of Washington, they do offer a relevant historical perspective. One is the Department of the Interior’s Biennial Survey of Education (1937); the second is a report commissioned by the American Association of University Professors, authored by Malcolm Willey: Depression, Recovery, and Higher Education (1937, McGraw-Hill, 543 pp.).
At the onset of the depression, there were 1706 institutions of higher education in the U.S. By 1936, only 42 of them (2.5 percent) had closed or had been annexed in a merger; most of these were junior colleges. The income of colleges and universities dropped by 38 percent from 1929 to 1934; the reduction from public sources was 31 percent. But the colleges managed to keep their teachers: from 1930 to 1934 the numbers of faculty decreased by only 0.4 percent, and then increased by 3.8 percent from 1934 to 1936. Salaries were reduced, and in addition many functions of the university suffered. In a sample of 159 institutions in 38 states, these were the policies (in addition to salary reduction) that were adopted (Willey, p. 209):
Policy | Number of institutions |
1. Reduction in cost of maintaining and operating buildings and grounds | 113 |
2. Elimination of miscellaneous expenses not directly concerning instruction of students | 110 |
3. Undertaking no new construction except where special funds are provided | 92 |
4. Increasing faculty load by not making appointments to vacancies | 81 |
5. Reducing expenditures for travel | 80 |
6. Reducing clerical help and office expense | 78 |
7. Rearranging courses so as to enlarge size of classes or so as to give courses in alternate years or semesters | 68 |
8. Postponing purchase of library books | 61 |
9. Reducing expenditures for publicity bureaus and for university press publications | 57 |
10. Eliminating or reducing appropriations for publication | 42 |
11. Postponing or denying all leaves of absence with pay | 37 |
12. Omitting renewal of annual appointments | 29 |
13. Reducing extension and correspondence work | 19 |
14. Reducing expenditures for research | 19 |
15. Eliminating or reducing extra pay for summer sessions | 16 |
16. Substituting demonstration lectures for individual laboratory experiments in large courses | 7 |
The depression was hard on students. In contrast to prices in the general economy, the cost of student tuition continued its upward trend. Average in-state tuition for a student in arts and sciences at a public university increased from $57 in 1929-30 to $64 in 1934-35. Student enrollment declined by 6 percent from 1929-30 to 1933-34. [As an aside, it is interesting that in-state tuition then was equivalent to 2 percent of an average professor’s salary, whereas now it is about 7 percent.]
Of course, universities did not just suffer patiently through the depression; they were also key to the recovery. While most professors carried on educating the students, some took leaves of absence to assist federal and state governments. But that’s another story.
