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Hard times
What happens to students' values when the economy tanks?
April 14, 2009
U-M students of the 1920s were ripped for being "materialistic, hedonistic, intellectually incurious and immature." Click image for larger version. (Photo courtesy U-M Bentley Historical Library.)
Not so long ago, when new technologies were driving an unprecedented expansion of the American economy, a U-M sociologist conducted a survey of undergraduate life. After a lengthy study, he declared that, as a group, U-M students were materialistic, hedonistic, intellectually incurious and immature.
Most students from well-to-do families, he observed, regarded college as "no more than a pleasant four-year holiday. Even among those from less well-to-do homes, the motives are not always of the best. Probably the majority are aiming to increase their earning power in later life, some to distinguish themselves in campus activities. A burning desire for knowledge is relatively infrequent… The ambition of many—it would probably not be an exaggeration to say most—undergraduates is aptly expressed by the phrase, 'getting by.'"
Professor Robert Cooley Angell's surveys of University of Michigan students in the 1920s and '30s found dramatic differences in values and personality.
The observer was Robert Cooley Angell, professor of economics and sociology from 1926 to 1969. The subjects of his study were the undergraduates of the 1920s.
So…college students seem not to have changed much. Yet according to Robert Angell, they did change, at least once. It happened soon after his original study. When he resurveyed the campus in the winter of 1932-33, he discovered students to be markedly more mature, more serious and more studious than their predecessors in the 1920s.
"The depression," Angell wrote, "however calamitous its other effects, does seem to have put college students into a more serious frame of mind and led them to points of view and values considerably more mature than those which they held in 1929."
Raised in Ann Arbor, Angell was the grandson of James Burrill Angell, president of U-M from 1871 to 1909. His father and his uncle were U-M professors. He earned his B.A. (1922) and Ph.D. (1924) at U-M, then joined the faculty as a sociologist in the Department of Economics, later serving as chairman of the sociology department and president of the American Sociological Association. His conclusions about Michigan students of the Roaring Twenties were published in 1928 as "The Campus: A Study of Contemporary Undergraduate Life in the American University." He had "the gift of a great teacher," a colleague recalled. "He was able to see where students were and then to help them to take the next step."
Students reading and listening to records in their dorm (above) and playing field hockey, circa 1937 (below). Even pastimes changed during the Depression. Movies and dancing became less popular, while participation in intramural sports increased. Students became more serious in their academic work, personal hobbies and even romantic lives. Click images for larger versions. (Photos courtesy U-M Bentley Historical Library.)
Angell continued his survey into 1929, the year the Great Depression began. By the end of 1932, a once-popular Republican president had been replaced in the White House by a bold Democrat, and many students—even from prosperous families—were barely scraping by. Large numbers had no choice but to drop out.
That winter, as Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal, Angell put several students to work with a new set of questionnaires. They asked "those intimately connected with student life"—seniors, sorority housemothers, professors, and dormitory heads—to rate changes in undergraduate life since the Crash of 1929. They asked especially about "internal rather than external factors"—that is, indications of changes in behavior and character "which will largely determine the adjustments of these students to life situations once economic strains are eased."
Here's what they found:
- "A more serious interest in academic work." Professors reported that students of 1932-33 were studying harder, cutting fewer classes, and doing more supplementary reading than their predecessors of the 1920s.
- A decline in dating. "This is undoubtedly because of the unwillingness of many men to take out women when they cannot spend money upon them," Angell wrote, and "the number of student engagements has naturally fallen off too."
- Changes in values. "All observers agree that undergraduates are wrestling more seriously with the problem of developing a philosophy of life than they were in 1929." The researchers also found evidence that men and women were looking for new qualities in each other. "The popularity of women with men seems now to be much less dependent on clever repartee, dancing, clothes, membership in a sorority or being of 'good family.'" Women were assessing men for evidence of "intelligence, sincerity, good character…and, peculiarly, good dancing…," while "being a 'big man on the campus,' wealth, clothes and being a fraternity member are considered less important."
- Changes in recreation. Movies and dancing, the most popular of seven pastimes in 1929, dropped to sixth and fourth most popular, respectively, in 1933. Participation in intramural sports increased.
- An increase in serious reading outside class. Angell and his students found that out of seven leisure pursuits, reading for pleasure jumped from sixth place among students in 1929 to first place in 1932-33. They assumed this was partly because "reading…is cheap," and, indeed, the library's circulation figures were way up. Yet "the sale of the lowest type of sex magazines has fallen off precipitately," while "the periodical room of the library reports twice the reading of critical magazines like Harper's." Reading of serious newspapers was reported to have nearly doubled.
No one knows if the current crisis is the beginning of another depression. But Robert Angell's findings some 80 years ago could be a harbinger of the effects of the crisis, whatever its depth or duration, on this generation of students.
Sources include Robert Cooley Angell, "The Campus: A Study of Contemporary Undergraduate Life in the American University" (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1928) and "The Trend Toward Greater Maturity Among Undergraduates Due to the Depression," School and Society, 9/23/1933; and Gayle D. Ness, "Robert Cooley Angell (1899-1984)," ASA Footnotes, May 1985.
is an author and historian. His most recent book is "To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight."