1940: Carnegie Foundation For The Advancement Of Teaching

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, at the close of its fiscal year 1939-40, held resources totaling $24,504,468, at book value. Investments amounted to $22,973,790, with $1,530,677 cash in banks. Endowment funds (General Endowment, Division of Educational Enquiry) contained some $16,817,513; the rest was held in its Reserves. Securities yielded $869,261.

A total of $1,945,191 was disbursed in retiring allowances and pensions, of which $1,414,113 went for 903 age allowances, $34,576 for 31 disability allowances, $10,192 for six allowances granted on a service basis, and $486,308 for pensions to 602 widows. Individual age allowances averaged about $1,513.

Issued November 18, 1939, a New York Supreme Court order enables the Foundation to meet retiring allowances and widows pensions over a term of years when its income will be insufficient. The Court authorized and directed the Foundation to accept supplementary funds up to $15,000,000 from Carnegie Corporation of New York, and to use about one-third of the Foundation's principal. The plan is ultimately to repay, beginning in about 1967, the borrowings from the Foundation's General Endowment Fund and from the Corporation, without interest, out of income. No retiring allowance or pension of the Foundation once granted has ever been reduced. It is believed that this achievement will now be maintained, subject only to the maintenance of the present economic system.

Under a co-operative arrangement with Carnegie Corporation which has existed for 16 years, the Carnegie Foundation received during 1939-40 for studies and researches $21,000 on account of educational inquiries being conducted in the Foundation's offices. On grants for special educational research projects the Corporation paid $55,015 which the Foundation distributed. All told, Carnegie Corporation has made to the Foundation 157 grants totaling $1,606,708 for 88 higher educational projects. Of these, 14 involving $493,843 in 37 grants have been carried on in the Foundation offices.

On Oct. 2, 1939, was published Bulletin Number Thirty of the Foundation, Studies in Early Graduate Education, by W. Carson Ryan. The volume concerns particularly the unusual early achievements of the Johns Hopkins University, Clark University, and the University of Chicago. According to Dr. Ryan, these universities' first presidents recognized the urgency of certain contemporary needs not being met by the conventional college education of their day, placed students and faculty ahead of buildings, enrollments, administration, and organization, and insisted vigorously upon the highest quality of intellect and character in their institutions.

The Foundation's Bulletin Number Thirty-one, issued June 7, 1940, An Experiment in Responsible Learning, by Dr. William S. Learned and Mrs. Anna L. Rose Hawkes, grew out of the Foundation's Pennsylvania study. The main purpose of the inquiry was to 'discover and measure the durable intellectual capital of young students. . . . The student must first learn that he stands alone and that his education is within him.' Results of one experiment to this end, executed at minimal cost but with much care, 'should prove encouraging to any teacher willing and able to undertake the sustained and exacting effort.'

Dr. Learned directs two other studies: the Graduate Record Examination and the Pennsylvania follow-up inquiry. In the Graduate Record Examination project, searching new-type tests were given to 1,457 students in the graduate schools of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia, representing 448 different colleges and 208 graduate institutions. The series of tests, modified, was subsequently administered to 1,702 entering graduate students in the original four universities and at Brown and the University of Rochester. In 1940 eleven other colleges examined their senior classes, about 2,100 students. The project provides a common standard against which the individual student may note his relative position in academic subjects in comparison with other students of his standing in many colleges.

Dr. Learned's inquiry into the learning and forgetting of some 70 college graduates over a seven-year period shows that the 'peak of knowledge to which the college brings its students as seniors possesses unexpected persistence, and that academic attainment recedes more slowly than many had supposed.'

Dr. Walter A. Jessup is president of the Foundation, and Howard J. Savage secretary and treasurer. Offices are at 522 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.