Emory University's Battle with Housing and Enrollment Growth Post-WWII
The U.S. Congress, seeking to reintegrate veterans into civil society at the end of WWII, passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill. This law funded extensive benefits for returning veterans, subsidizing housing, healthcare, and education to fast-track their road back to normal civilian life. One of the most widely utilized provisions covered the cost of a college degree for a duration of time commensurate with the amount of time a former soldier had served (Emory University Archives, 1944-1945). The G.I. Bill is generally regarded as a major success that boosted veterans into a burgeoning, educated, and suburban middle class. Practically speaking, however, the immediate result of this was tens of thousands of new consumers of college education within the span of two years. Demand skyrocketed, and it took years for universities across the country to adjust capacity accordingly. Emory University saw one of the most dramatic rises in enrollment rates of any school in the Southeast.
Starting in 1944, and continuing to at least 1950, Emory’s annual records included reports from an “Office of Veterans Education.” Despite its name, the office’s main concern in the latter half of the 1940s was not educating newly enrolled veterans but housing them. In 1946, reports began to appear in internal administrative communications, raising flags about a record increase in enrollment. At the end of 1945 the university had 2,838 enrolled students. By the end of 1946, the number had climbed to 3,827 (Emory University Archives, 1944-1950). The next year, the number reached 4,822, and before the decade was out, enrollment surpassed 5,000 students. Within just five years, enrollment at the university had doubled. The school had economic incentives to accept this record number of students; government-sponsored tuition revenue spiked and allowed for major expansions to the university facilities and programs in the following decade. Perhaps even stronger still were cultural pressures. Rejecting service members returning from the most destructive war in human history, regardless of how valid capacity concerns might have been, would have painted the university in an extremely poor light. As a result, the student body more than doubled in size in two years. A fifth of these newcomers brought spouses with them who also required housing, and half of that group also had at least one — often infant — child (Emory University Archives, 1945-1946). The paltry on-campus housing facilities were never designed to host this many students and were certainly never designed to house families at such a large scale.
Off-campus housing was insufficient despite further provisions in the G.I. Bill that mandated extremely favorable terms for mortgages and home loans returning veterans took on. The issue was not one of cost but rather one of capacity — there were simply not enough homes in the city of Atlanta. Nationwide, the National Housing Agency estimated a shortfall of at least 12 million homes in the late 1940s (Burns, 2001). Houses, cheap as they might have been, still took time to construct. Furthermore, while many veterans did seize on their momentary advantageous position in the market, the vast majority of them purchased property in rapidly developing suburbs. Those who had elected to become students were forced to remain in the already developed city and immediately surrounding towns, where it was much harder to secure real estate. Private, off-campus housing was not a feasible solution. Some students who were unable to find off-campus housing were forced to transfer or drop out entirely.
What followed was an intense scramble to utilize every meter of livable space on university property. Graduate and Greek housing was commandeered and turned into emergency overflow. The university purchased and turned a nearby naval barracks into student housing. Hundreds of trailers were converted into homes and set up in the fields outside of academic buildings, and army training centers were torn down and used to build row after row of cheap but poorly insulated prefabricated apartments. Despite all these efforts, the waiting list for married students looking for housing soon numbered in the hundreds and would remain so for two years after the mass construction projects (Emory University Archives, 1945-1946).
It was also rapidly becoming clear that the rushed construction had led to several major safety concerns. The salvaged army construction materials were of deficient quality and deemed to be critical fire risks. Danger to students aside, this led university officials to believe that the buildings would fall into such disrepair within the next ten years that they would not legally be allowed to be occupied. As a result, administrators made a deliberate choice to avoid any “expensive capital investments” in these areas (Emory University Archives, 1947-1947). While not investing in a doomed asset was a perfectly reasonable economic stance, it meant that students living in these facilities would face no respite from the discomfort caused by poor construction.
Yet, despite all the struggles, it was evident that the denizens of these trailers and hastily assembled towns cared deeply for each other and had as much community as a modern residence hall on Emory’s campus. The huge demand for housing meant that the trailer village and temporary housing constructs were always full. Stories from The Emory Wheel from 1945-1950 tell of married students from these trailers organizing a collective nursery and other cooperative groups, allowing students — both men and women, especially those in the nursing school — to attend classes without fear of leaving their children unattended (Emory Wheel, 1946). There are records of these students meeting and organizing themselves to deal with various problems in theirsmall community from as early as 1946. The students even elected their own municipal-style government to committees on sanitation, publicity, communal food, and the shared nursery, all from their “city hall” in the university’s cafeteria.
Around 1950, as the number of veterans from WWII enrolled in college steadily decreased with each successive graduating class, concerns over housing started to lessen. The temporary dormitories that made up “Lower Slobbovia” were used in bits and pieces all the way up until 1950. That same year would see the cessation of the representative from the Georgia Veterans Affairs Office’s annual visits to campus, as well as the folding of the Office of Veterans Education into the[a] Student Aid and Graduate Placement program.
Edited by Disha Kumar
References
Emory University Archives. (1944-1945). Annual Reports to the President. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
Emory University Archives. (1944-1950). Annual Reports to the President. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
Emory University Archives. (1945-1946). Annual Reports to the President. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
Burns, L. (2001). Atlanta Housing 1944-1965. Georgia State University.
Emory University Archives. (1945-1946). Annual Reports to the President. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
Emory University Archives. (1947-1947). Annual Reports to the President. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
Day Nursery Activated; Co-Op Being Considered. (1946). Emory Wheel, p. 3. Retrieved from LUNA.
Student Council of Emory University. The campus. [1944] [Photograph]. (1944). Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. https://digital.library.emory.edu/purl/2902z34tz9-cor.
