In “The Challenge to America,” Conant wrote about the changes and challenges in American higher education brought about the GI Bill, which was opening up the possibility of a college education to a far broader cross-section of the American population than ever before. According to a sidebar to the article, in 1940 only 186,500 Americans held college degrees, a mere 14/100ths of one percent of the country’s total population. This situation had already begun to change before the war. Within the article, Conant cited statistics that showed that in 1940 for every 1,000 students in the fifth grade there were 770 entering and 417 graduating from high school, 144 entering college and 72 receiving a college degree, still under 10 per cent. He wrote that the nation was still far from achieving educational equality. He speculated that these statistics undoubtedly varied regionally and demographically, with the population of major metropolitan areas, particularly in the Northeast, accounting for much of the high school and college graduates. In the large cities of the Northeast, he said, an academically gifted, ambitious student of modest means could receive adequate preparation for college from the public school system and then had the opportunity of attending a first-rate university in his city as a commuter student. This opportunity did not exist in small towns or rural backwaters.
Conant pointed out that the immediate problem for colleges across the country was accommodating the veterans flooding campuses under the GI Bill. Schools were running night and day to meet the demand. Classes were being held in trailers and Quonset huts. Lecture halls were standing room only. Students and their families were living in converted barracks or other makeshift accommodations often far from campus. In New York, both NYU and Columbia were struggling to deal with enormously expanded student populations that had made them both among the largest schools in the country, while maintaining their educational standards. NYU had the highest number of veterans in the country. About one-third of the NYU student body was returning veterans, according to another The New York Times article, about half of whom were resuming their interrupted NYU education. The student body was now 2-1 male, reversing the female dominance of the war years. With more than 39,000 students enrolled for the fall semester of 1946, NYU was second only to Berkeley in overall enrollment and number one if part-time students were included according to a Time magazine story.
In her memoir Fame & Folly, Cynthia Ozick wrote of students sprawled on the floors of overfilled lecture halls at NYU, which she was attending as a 17- year-old freshman commuter student in 1946. The school day ran well into the evening. She wrote also of her resentment at the time of the somber, pragmatic “old” men in their twenties and thirties still wearing bits and pieces of their uniforms with their noses buried in accounting books in the cafeteria. She felt that they lacked interest in art, literature, political and cultural debate, extracurricular activities and anything else that did not have practical value for their future careers.
Conant felt in addition to the short term crisis there were a number of longer term questions that needed to be addressed. He questioned if the nation would be able to provide suitable jobs for this sudden upsurge in college graduates. Were we creating a new class of disgruntled adults who would have to settle for positions that formerly were filled by high school graduates? Would this new democratization of opportunity continue beyond the immediate postwar years? If so, then how? Could we really accommodate everyone who wanted to go to college? If not, how did we decide which students would have the opportunity and which would be turned away? According the an article in American Weekly that same weekend, there already were 1-million vets who had hoped to attend college but had found there was no space for them. Conant was an advocate of junior colleges which could provide the career-oriented training sought by many. He also advocated federal funding, to be administered by the states, to allow colleges and universities to accommodate increased enrollment on a more permanent basis.
In his article Conant acknowledged that economic and social factors made complete educational equality impossible to achieve. One barrier that he cited gingerly was the importance of family in our society. Conant no doubt spoke from firsthand experience of the natural expectation of the privileged to pass on their privilege to their children. A spot at Harvard or Yale or other elite universities was seen as an entitlement by the long-established wealthy families of the Northeast. And many self-made men thought that priority admission of their progeny to a top university was among the expected trophies of their success. He acknowledged the economic hurdles that prevented many talented kids from blue-collar or lower- middle class families from attending college. He might have added the barriers often thrown up by social customs and expectations. In many families and communities at this time young men were expected to contribute to the family income or be self-sufficient in their teens, even if family economics did not demand it. College was for the exceptions among them- the star athletes, the geniuses and the charismatic leaders. The rest were expected to follow their fathers into the factories or the fields or their mothers into early marriage.
Conant takes up one of his pet causes, the need to provide educational opportunities to bright young men from the small towns and rural communities of America who were underrepresented at major universities and consequently in leadership positions in society later in life. Some cynics saw this emphasis on students from the Protestant heartland as a veiled, politer form of anti-Semitism. Many of the academically qualified applicants to Harvard from the big Eastern cities, who Conant argued had ample opportunity at higher education closer to home, were Jewish. In the 1920s he had supported a quota system that his predecessor Abbott Lawrence Lowell had sought to impose that would have limited the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard to 15 percent. The proposal had failed in the face of faculty opposition but Lowell had achieved his objective through backdoor policies. When he took over the presidency, Conant officially reversed Lowell’s more blatant policies but some of his critics saw his stress on favoring students from other regions of the country as a de facto quota system. To keep a perspective, even the 15 percent quota proposed by Lowell represented a considerably greater proportion of the student body than at most other elite institutions of the time (Yale’s student body was about 3 percent Jewish in the 1920s), as well as being several times greater than the proportion of Jews in the general population. In a November issue of The New Yorker following Barack Obama's election, Roger Angell remembered a Harvard classmate of the 1940s, an African American, who was accepted to Harvard Medical School after the war but then denied entry because there were no other black students with whom he could room. Earlier when the same student was an undergraduate, Conant had apologized to the Naval Academy for the university's insensitivity in sending this Negro student to Annapolis to play lacrosse. with the Harvard team; the Navy team had refused to take to the field until he had been sent home, an incident that drew press attention and student protests at Harvard but only an apology from Conant.
Harvard traditionally had relied largely on entrance exams in choosing its freshman class. This was not an entirely democratic system since elite prep schools and private tutors better prepared privileged students for the exam than did most public schools, and exceptions were made for the socially well-connected, but it did give Catholics, Jews and other kids from public schools a fighting chance for admission. In contrast schools like Yale and Princeton claimed to take the whole man into account in their admission procedures, finding that in their considered opinion very few Jews or hyphenated Americans, no matter how good their grades, had sufficient character or leadership to qualify for admission unless they played football. As a result Harvard was the first choice of many ambitious Jewish student scholars, whether part of the assimilated, established “Our Crowd” of German origin or the sons of upwardly mobile recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, who felt with good reason that they would be unwelcome at Yale or Princeton or even Columbia. NYU and the University of Pennsylvania were also popular choices among Jews at the time. Harvard’s Jewish enrollment had swelled to a peak of 27 percent in the 1920s according to Martin Duberman’s recent bio of Lincoln Kirstein, who was among the Jewish students at Harvard during this decade. Lowell and his supporters, not exactly open-minded but far from Nazis, feared that Harvard might become perceived as too “Jewish.” Lowell made the offensive, but not completely illogical, “tipping point” argument, comparing Harvard to resorts that had been abandoned not only by the WASP elite but also by the assimilated German Jewish elite once they were perceived as being “too Jewish.” It seems as if it was all a matter to him of defending the Harvard brand. But Lowell’s adversaries, including his predecessor, Charles William Eliot, and much of the faculty steadfastly maintained that religious belief or ethnic origin should play no part in college admission.
Earlier in 1946, The Times reported on a study that showed that an increased emphasis on geographical distribution by the private colleges within New York City had led to a 50 percent drop in the number of Jewish students admitted in the decade before the war. Catholic enrolment had also dropped sharply and Negroes were virtually excluded. The city’s medical schools were the worst offenders, with City College graduates finding it increasingly difficult to gain admission to top medical schools in the city according to the study. One anonymous head of admissions after adamantly denying a quota system went off the record to tell the interviewer that “Italian boys made poor material for the kind of graduates that the school wanted.”