Funding and Enrollment
Wilson College Enrollment through the 1930's.
Letter from President E.D. Warfield to a board member discussing the Depression.
For Wilson College, like many other colleges in the United States, the Depression began to reach the academy during the academic year 1932-33. Fortunately for Wilson, funding for the students came to them just in the nick of time.
Enrollment increased the following year. In the academic year of 1933-34, at 452 students, enrollment was the highest it would be for the rest of the 1930s. Wilson was well equipped for this peak in enrollment due partly to the Curran Estate. Dr. William Curran, a philosopher and physician bequeathed his estate, yielding $50,000 a year to further women’s education. The sum of the scholarships was used “for payment of tuition, boarding and lodging.”[1] Another estate also helped students during this time - the Hagop Bogigian Estate. The money from this estate acted as a loan for the students.
While the Curran Estate was a major source of funding, the faculty at Wilson helped the students financially as well. President Warfield noted in a letter to Board of Trustees President Colonel Moorhead Kennedy on September 8, 1933 that he would “like especially to speak of the debt that we owe to faculty members, notably the Dean and Miss Syvret, for personal loans which they have made to girls who could not secure it elsewhere.”[2] With the estate money and the faculty members’ help, students at Wilson were being financially aided so that they could continue their college education. The academic school years of 1933-34 and 1934-35 were met with some anxiety, with regard to housing. The campus was only equipped to house 400 girls at best. By 1933-34, every space on campus was filled. The College placed three girls to a room in some cases. The College was also placing some residential students in off campus housing, mainly living with professors. By the academic year of 1935-36, Wilson was slowly dealing with housing. Only one residential student had to live off campus by then. The president and the members of the board were still concerned about enrollment.
Despite available financial assistance, Wilson’s enrollment slowly began to decrease after 1933-34, the school’s peak year. To try to combat it, the college began to automatically offer scholarships of $200 to unsuccessful candidates for the Curran Scholarship. In the Dean’s Report on November 1936, Dean Lillian M. Rosenkrans stated that “so far as I can now see [declining enrollment] is attributable not to an alarming decrease in the number of applicants, but to the policy of the College in refusing admission to girls whose records show that they will have trouble in maintaining their work at college level.[3] By the following year, maintaining good students was not the only issue at hand. While the Curran estate was a major source of funding, those benefits were relatively short-lived. With the income of the estate decreasing, “the Orphans' Court ruled that income from the estate would be enough to see Curran students at Wilson during 1937-38 through to the end of their College career."[4] The Depression was not felt as much at Wilson due partly to the Curran estate and other financial assistance. By the mid-thirties, 58% of the students in Wilson received some form of scholarship aid. The peak enrollment for Wilson was 1933-34, with 453 students. The lowest enrollment for the college during the 1930s was at the end of the decade, 1939-40, with 383 students.
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1. Mary B. McElwain, "Report of the Alumnae Trustee", Wilson Alumnae Quarterly, August 1933, 16-18.
2. E.D. Warfield letter to Colonel Morrehead Kennedy, September 8, 1933.
3. Minutes, Wilson College Board of Trustees, 1936-1937, C. Elizabeth Boyd '33 Archives, page 466.
4. Judith Evans Longacre, The History of Wilson College 1868 to 1970, Volume I. (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 81.