There are a few gems scattered through Statistics Canada’s archives. Digging around their site the other day, I came across a fantastic trove of documents published by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (as StatsCan used to be called) called Higher Education in Canada. The earliest number in this series dates from 1938, and is available here. I urge you to read the whole thing, because it’s a hoot. But let me just focus in on a couple of points in this document worth pondering.

The first point of interest is the enrolment statistics (see page 65 of the PDF, 63 of the document). It won’t of course surprise anyone to know that enrolment at universities was a lot smaller in 1937-38 than it is today (33,600 undergraduates then, 970,000 or so now), or that colleges were non-existent back then. What is a bit striking is the large number of students being taught in universities who were “pre-matriculation” (i.e. high school students). Nearly one-third of all students in universities in 1937-38 had this “pre-matric” status. Now, two-thirds of these were in Quebec, where the “colleges classiques” tended to blur the line between secondary and post-secondary (and, in their new guise as CEGEPs, still kind of do). But outside of British Columbia, all universities had at least some pre-matric, which would have made these institutions quite different from modern ones.

The second point of interest is the section on entrance requirements at various universities (page 12-13 of the PDF, p. 10-11 of the document). With the exception of UNB, every Canadian university east of the Ottawa River required Latin or Greek in order to enter university, as did Queens, Western and McMaster. Elsewhere, Latin was an alternative to Mathematics (U of T), or an alternative to a modern language (usually French or German). What’s interesting here is not so much the decline in salience of classical languages, but the decline in salience of any foreign language. In 1938, it was impossible to gain admission to a Canadian university without first matriculating in a second language, and at a majority of them a third language was required as well. I hear a lot of blah blah about internationalization on Canadian campuses, but 80 years on there are no Canadian universities which require graduates to learn a second language, let alone set this as a condition of entry. An area, clearly, where we have gone backwards.

The third and final bit to enjoy is the section on tuition fees (page 13), which I reproduce here:

*$1 in 1937-38 = $13.95 in 2016
**$1 in 1928-29 = $16.26 in 2016

Be a bit careful in comparing across years here: because of deflation, $100 in 1928 was worth $85 in 1937 and so institutions which kept prices stable in fact saw a rise in income in real terms. There are a bunch of interesting stories here, including the fact that institutions had very different pricing strategies in the depression. Some (e.g. McGill, Saskatchewan, Acadia) increased tuition while others (mostly Catholic institutions like the Quebec seminaries and St. Dunstan’s) either held the line or reduced costs. Also mildly amusing is the fact that McGill’s tuition for in-province students is almost unchanged since 1937-38 (one can imagine the slogan: “McGill – we’ve been this cheap since the Rape of Nanking!”).

The more interesting point here is that if you go back to the 1920s, not all Canadian universities were receiving stable and recurrent operating grants from provincial governments (of note: nowhere in this digest of university statistics is government funding even mentioned). Nationally, in 1935, all universities combined received $5.4 million from provincial governments – and U of T accounted for about a quarter of that. For every dollar in fees universities received from students, they received $1.22 from government. So when you see that universities were for the most part charging around $125 per students in 1937-38, what that means is that total operating funding per student was maybe $275, or a shade under $4500 per student in today’s dollars. That’s about one-fifth of today’s operating income per student.

While most of that extra per-student income has gone towards making institutions more capital-intensive (scientific facilities in general were pretty scarce in the 1930s), there’s no question that the financial position of academics had improved. If you take a quick gander at page 15, which shows the distribution of professorial salaries, you’ll see that average annual salaries for associate profs was just below $3500, while those for full professors was probably in the $4200 range. Even after for inflation, that means academic salaries were less than half what they are today. Indeed, one of the reasons tenure was so valued back then was that job security made up for the not-stellar pay. Times change.

In any case, explore this document on your own: many hours (well, minutes anyway) of fun to be had here.