Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

Small by Design: Resilience in an Era of Mass Higher Education
Williams College
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.
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
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