# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1956_S247
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

iad telioa eden etna a

Semone ech eR BRIM Mey a

246 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

It would be a serious omission to fail to indicate that private
philanthropy and special benefaction has been and continues to be
a source of often unheralded but nevertheless unceasing minor
income for Synod’s institutions. There have been individuals who,
in one way or another, have sought publicly and privately to con-
tribute to the institutions of the church either by way of outright
gifts or of legacies and bequests or through annuity arrangements.
The alumni groups of Synod’s colleges and seminaries have gen-
erally been willing and steady in their support, although in con-
trast to the alumni of many schools of higher learning, their own
economic resources have seldom permitted them to become a major
source of supplementary income for their alma maters. The sup-
porting constituency of almost every one of Synod’s schools includes
such active organizations as a college ladies’ auxiliary, seminary
guilds, college men’s clubs, and college associations who seek to
benefit the respective institutions and their students through the
furnishing and procurement of a variety of projects and benefits,
Until the recent and noteworthy benefactions directed to Synod’s
teachers colleges in River Forest and Seward by way of Ford
Foundation grants, foundations and charitable trusts have been
totally absent as a source of income for the synodical system of
schools.

Despite the general unavailability of major sources of supple-
mentary income, Synod’s colleges and seminaries for many years
have found themselves confronted, and have in turn confronted the
Board for Higher Education and the Fiscal Conference, with
increasing annual budgetary needs. Part of this is ascribable to
a general increase in professional students enrolled, matched in
most schools with a corresponding decline in nonprofessional
students and the additional income which they occasionally
brought to the school. But most of the continuing increase is part
of the general higher-education picture in the United States:
good education costs more. A recent study of 54 state and munici-
pal institutions, for example, indicated that in the five-year period
from 1948 to 1953 the average current operating costs per full-time
student rose from $492 to $911 for educational costs only, or an
85-per-cent increase in five short school years.

Any school of higher learning attempts to pass on to its
student as much of the increased educational cost as it can, in
spite of a variety of pressures to hold the lowest possible educa-
tional fee level for all. For the same group of 54 institutions for
the sarne period of years, the educational fees only rose from $128
to $167 on the average, for an increase of 23 per cent. Hardly six
years ago, your Board for Higher Education undertook a survey
of the student educational fee structure at Synod’s institutions