This special anniversary issue of the Independent features an excerpt from the essay by historian John R. Thelin, written for Meeting the Challenge: America’s Independent Colleges and Universities Since 1956, a volume prepared as part of the recognition of the 50th anniversary of CIC’s founding in 1956.

Private colleges have responded to changing demographics in a distinctive manner, and they have been especially effective as part of the spectrum of American postsecondary education. Between 1981 and 2001, for example, independent colleges and universities enrolled only 21 percent of first-year students, but they conferred a much larger percentage of the nation’s bachelor’s degrees—37 percent. While the large public institutions were enrolling more students, the smaller colleges were seeing more of their students graduate.

The liberal arts colleges also grew with the times. The first sign that private colleges could help absorb a new generation of students came with the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1945, popularly known as the GI Bill. One strength of this legislation was that it gave qualified veterans choices about their education. Scholarships and living expense stipends could be used at any accredited institution. Within the marketplace of American postsecondary education, liberal arts colleges were an attractive choice for veterans of World War II and later the Korean War. From 1945 to 1953 the small colleges welcomed student-veterans, rearranging facilities and courses to accommodate the influx of mature students.

Although the bulge in enrollments from the GI Bill was temporary and started to subside by 1952, it did give trustees and leaders at liberal arts colleges a preview of changing demographics. Even with the unprecedented number of high school graduates who sought postsecondary education between 1945 and 1975, independent colleges still had to maintain their appeal by being distinctive and affordable. One partial solution to the national demand was for liberal arts colleges to increase the number of students they admitted; institutions usually opted for careful, limited growth. Since massive expansion was not considered an educationally sound option, many liberal arts colleges now found that they had more qualified applicants than they could accept. For these fortunate colleges the years from the 1950s to the 1970s became an era of selective admissions. Some liberal arts colleges began to carve out special niches in American higher education. These were the schools that sociologist Burton Clark characterized as the “Distinctive Colleges,” a category that included such institutions as Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Antioch College in Ohio, and Reed College in Oregon.

The long-run demographic prospects that surfaced in the late 1950s were small consolation to college presidents and deans immediately after World War II when they faced unexpected financial strains as the nation shifted to a post-war economy. A spurt of inflation that approached double digits between 1945 and 1950 put private colleges to a stern test. Annual expenses for campus operations—including energy, construction, and maintenance—soared far beyond the budget plans drafted a few years earlier.

The financial strains can be illustrated in the growth of annual operating expenses at one small college between 1939 and 1949. In 1949 Life magazine published a feature article about Williams College in Massachusetts, which it presented as the pinnacle of excellent undergraduate education in the United States. According to the Life editors, Williams demonstrated that “In an era of mass teaching … smallness [is] a virtue.” The faculty was well known for its close attention to student learning. The idyllic elm-lined campus of historic brick buildings was the setting for uncrowded libraries, state-of-the-art laboratories, a cohesive social life, and class sizes that averaged 20 students, almost always taught by full-time professors. The bad news was that despite its tradition, prestige, and endowment, “The college has a hard time making ends meet.”

Williams College’s operating budgets before and after World War II (in actual dollars, unadjusted for inflation) provide a clear picture of the financial difficulties some colleges faced:



These figures show an increase by more than one-half over less than a decade. Most alarming was the fact that the increase was uneven. Most independent colleges, like Williams, had greatly reduced their expenses and operations during the war years. The increase was sharply concentrated in the years after 1945, due primarily to a surge in post-war inflation. Had colleges been extravagant in their post-war spending? No. To the contrary, the Williams case suggests sound institutional stewardship; the college had actually contained educational costs. The national inflation rate in that decade was 73 percent—significantly higher than the college’s 57 percent overall increase. And this at a time when the pressure on campus buildings and physical plant was especially great because the college was welcoming a new wave of undergraduate students.

Even though the college had not indulged in lavish spending on new facilities or programs for undergraduates, it was losing ground in its annual efforts to balance its budget. The cost to educate a student at Williams in the academic year 1948–1949 was $1,300. With tuition at $600 and room and board at $180, an undergraduate’s family paid only $780 toward the real cost of $1,300. The college was required to provide an additional $520 per student that year to meet educational costs. Little wonder, then, that Williams was having difficulty balancing its annual operating budget.

Williams College is an important example because it represented a “best case scenario” as an established, strong liberal arts college which, despite all its resources, planning, and alumni support, still faced severe problems. Other small colleges faced even worse situations. For example, at Transylvania University in Kentucky, the newly inaugurated president in 1949 inherited a financial crisis in which the college was hard-pressed to pay local vendors and contractors for building repairs—just as the University of Kentucky across town was enjoying increased state appropriations for capital construction and student tuition subsidies. St. John’s College in Maryland had impeccable academic standing but was denied regional accreditation until 1953 because of its financial instability. Elsewhere, presidents and business officers faced their own variations on the theme of financial hard times.

One obvious “solution” was to pass the new expenses on to students and their families by raising tuition. To do so, however, would have jeopardized the small-college tradition of keeping education affordable—and run the risk of deterring large numbers of potential students from applying for admission. Meanwhile, presidents of private colleges understood that their institutions were at a disadvantage compared with state universities that could ride out the inflationary bubble on supplementary appropriations from state governments. From New York to California, state legislators and postsecondary education officials committed themselves to “low tuition” or “no tuition” policies for in-state students at the public universities and junior colleges. The private colleges had no such recourse. A small number of the most affluent private colleges began to draw more heavily from their endowments to subsidize each student. But this was an option that few liberal arts colleges could even consider, let alone implement.

For most schools, the primary response was to trim the budget, tighten faculty and staff salaries, defer campus maintenance and construction—literally, do more with less. This, too, was an early glimpse of a recurring public policy concern for private colleges over the next half century: namely, how to reduce the “tuition gap” between themselves and public institutions that could charge relatively less thanks to state subsidies.

Copies of Meeting the Challenge: America’s Independent Colleges and Universities Since 1956 can be ordered here or by phone at (202) 466-7230. Discounts are available for purchases of multiple copies.