1940: Sloan Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Inc., expanded during 1940 its aid to schools and colleges in developing new 'patterns' in economic education. Grants amounting to $275,283 were made to nine educational institutions in the eleven months up to December 1, 1940, thus bringing the Foundation's total gifts since its organization in 1936 to $1,072,726.

Extending its activities into the South, the Foundation in 1940 enabled the state universities of Kentucky and of Florida to start experiments in applied economics designed to aid low-income groups. The experiments aim to discover whether solely through instructing school children in simple inexpensive ways of improving diet and housing, families and communities can be brought by their own efforts to a higher level of living.

To furnish the average citizen with a source of prompt, accurate and unbiased information on the mounting and complex taxes levied on him by local, state and federal governments, the Foundation this year made a grant in aid to the University of Pennsylvania to enable the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce to establish the Tax Institute. The Institute, formerly the Tax Policy League of New York, was thus enabled by the grant to expand its work under university auspices.

At the same time the Foundation continued its support of several other departures in economic education which it had previously sponsored. These included the University of Chicago Round Table of the Air, a weekly radio discussion of economic phases of national and international questions; The Educational Film Institute of New York University, which produces and distributes sound motion pictures on economic subjects; a national Institute for Consumer Education connected with Stephens College, a junior college for women at Columbia, Missouri; and the Public Affairs pamphlets, containing popular digests of current economic research, issued continuously by the Public Affairs Committee of New York.

Moreover, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Denver, the Foundation maintains a special group of ten fellowships offered to college graduates in national competition. At M.I.T. these are awarded to young industrial executives for a year's study of social and economic conditions. At Denver the fellowships provide training for a new profession — appraiser of local government — through an eighteen-month course in taxation and public expenditures.

The Foundation is a non-profit membership corporation organized under the laws of Delaware. Its income comes from an endowment established by Mr. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the motor car magnate, and Mrs. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., and from other gifts by him and his wife.