Education: War Goes to College

War has jigsawed and jumbled the traditional picture of U.S. higher education. Colleges find it is upsetting their finances, bollixing their standards, putting new strains on their faculties, bringing them new types of students, converting them into vocational schools and making them, like industry, into virtual subsidiaries of the Federal Government.

But the Army is not taking over U.S. higher education bodily as it did in World War I when the Students Army Training Corps put students in uniform, gave them a private's pay of $30 a month, set them drilling on the campuses. The result then was a total victory of military over academic training and a lasting mistrust of Army control among U.S. educators. U.S. colleges now make contracts with the Army & Navy, bend their facilities in every way toward war, but are maintaining their independence and jealously hoarding their principles—if nothing else.

The drop in undergraduate enrollments has been neither uniform nor drastic—so far. During the college terms just ending, enrollment dropped 20% at California, 15.3% at Texas, 3% at Brown, Notre Dame, Colorado, Iowa State. A few technical schools like M.I.T. have actually had slight increases. Law schools have lost an average of 36% since 1940. "Many law schools may have to consider seriously during 1943 the alternatives of suspending operations or combining with other schools," warned Yale's Dean A. G. Gulliver recently.

Bankruptcy or Rescue? Since student fees are a large source of college income (75% at Minnesota's Carleton College, 50% at Duke and Amherst, under 25% at most State-supported institutions), dwindling enrollments burden all colleges.

Says President Clarence A. Dykstra of the State-supported University of Wisconsin: "If we lose half our students, I hope the people of the State will understand that they will have to pay more to keep the university. . . ." Wringing extra funds from suspicious legislatures will be no easy job for Dykstra and his fellow presidents of State institutions.

Small private colleges have not yet figured out how to escape" bankruptcy. "That's what makes our hair grey and our sleep light," says young President Carter Davidson of Knox College (600 students) at Galesburg, Ill. "I guess we'll all just have to enlist." The House Military Affairs Committee last week asked Paul McNutt to explain any plans the War Manpower Commission may have devised to use small colleges as training centers for industrial workers (TIME, Dec. 28).

To bolster college enrollments, the National Education Association has urged colleges to accept bright high-school seniors as freshmen—i.e., to lower their entrance requirements. Though this plan has been attacked (TIME, Dec. 14), the University of Illinois last week agreed to accept selected high-school seniors.

Professors Retooled. A 5% drop in the number of college teachers was reported last month by the U.S. Office of Education. This overall drop is less important than the grim shortage of teachers of mathematics, physics and other subjects which students shun in peacetime, flock to in wartime. Answer to this problem is the "retooling" of professors.