By Dan Truckey
In 1955, Northern Michigan College was at a crossroads. Its growth as a university had been stunted by the Great Depression, WWII and then the Korean War. Originally, Northern primarily had a female student body as its original mission was to train teachers for the Upper Peninsula, Michigan and the Upper Midwest. However, by the 1930s, the campus had diversified its curriculum and the gender ratio was nearly 1 to 1. During WWII, the male student population dropped to 14 by 1943.
With the end of the war, the student body grew exponentially as a new crop of veterans, with G.I. Bills funding their education, enrolled at universities across the nation. Northern was no different, with its enrollment jumping from 326 in 1945 to 930 in 1946. For the next four years, the enrollment continued to grow but after the WWII veterans graduated and the Korean conflict began, Northern found itself in a precarious predicament. The State of Michigan had paid for a new dormitory and student union but enrollment was dropping.
By the mid-1950s, there were murmurings in the halls of Lansing that Northern’s days may be numbered. Compared to other state universities, Northern was struggling and serving a smaller population as the economic woes of the region began to take their grip. When Northern’s new president, Edgar G. Harden, came into office in 1956, he was told by a state rep from the Eastern Upper Peninsula that Northern should be closed (considering that Lake Superior State College in the Sault was founded after WWII and itself was struggling). Even the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Lee Thurston, stated publicly that Northern either needed to enter an expansion phase or face closure.
Harden had been hired by Northern to do just this, expand the university, and though there were many unknowns, one thing they did know was that the new baby boom in the post-war era was going to create an enormous need for institutions of higher education. Over the next 15 years, Northern’s enrollment would jump from 1,000 students in 1956 to over 8,000 in 1970. Besides the Baby Boom, what were the other reasons for Northern’s massive growth in the late 1950s and 1960s?
A Growing Middle Class
By the mid-1950s, the children and grandchildren of the immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century had 
come of age. Where in past decades, the expectation was that they would follow in their parents’ footsteps and either go into a trade or become unskilled laborers, the WWII generation saw things differently. After watching their grandparents and parents toiling in mines, forest, fields and factories, they wanted something more for themselves and their future. In fact, their parents often were the ones encouraging them to further their education. For this reason, across the country there was an increasing wave of young people seeking to get a college degree and enter into a profession. Whereas for women this was still largely limited to education and nursing, the veterans of WWII and the Korean War were able to attend college for almost no cost due to the G.I. Bill. Universities like Northern were filled with first-generation college students seeking a better life.
A Growing Economy
The post-war era was a time of great economic expansion in both the United States and Michigan. With investments in infrastructure like the Eisenhower Highway System, the auto industry saw a huge boom in production during the 1950s. In 1955, Detroit manufactured 40% more vehicles than the year before and though there were blips during the decade, largely the demand was greater than ever.
Nationally the economy grew by over 30% during the 1950s driven by manufacturing, construction and the growing technology boom. With the expanding economy came greater tax revenues and the ability to invest in education. It also created a need for a more educated populace to work in all corporate sectors, which increased enrollment at universities.
Edgar G. Harden
In 1956, Edgar G. Harden was appointed Northern’s sixth president and quickly went to work in raising funds from the State of Michigan to expand the college’s facilities. He had an uphill battle as there were many in Lansing that were not convinced of the need for Northern. In truth, even before Harden took over, there had been a significant uptick in enrollment. The numbers had nearly doubled from 1952 to 1956. This was in part due to the return of Korean War veterans who wanted to get the education but this was not the only reason. Across Michigan, enrollments were increasing at an alarming rate.
It was because of these increases that the State of Michigan began to invest in higher education. This included funding for new dormitories, classroom and laboratory facilities, performing arts centers, libraries and sports facilities. Harden was masterful in making sure Northern would receive its share of these funds and between 1956 and 1967, the university would build 10 dormitories, three classroom buildings, a student union, physical plant, married student housing and a new theater. In truth, Northern could not keep up with the growth of the student body in its physical expansion, and was forced to build the dormitories along Wright Street before any of the academic plaza buildings (West, Jamrich and the Learning Resource Center) were constructed. This led to several years of students walking across an open, windy and snowy hillside to get to classes.
The biggest impact that Harden had on enrollment was what would become known as the “right to try” policy. Though never an official program, it was a philosophy that Harden best articulated in the 1957 NMC Bulletin.
“…higher education should be accessible to all who have sufficient mental, physical, and moral competence to profit from an opportunity to attend college.”
What this meant was that any high school graduate could attend Northern on a 
probationary basis regardless of their high school grades or entrance exam scores. This most certainly attracted many students to Northern who simply would not have been accepted to other colleges. This would also help many non-traditional, underserved and underprivileged students attend college. This unofficial policy would still be central to Northern’s educational mission until the 1980s.
One of those students that Harden wanted to attract were athletes. Northern already had a long, proud tradition in men’s athletics but its ambitions were relatively small. In fact, when Harden became president, all of the men’s athletic teams were all coached by the director of the athletic program, C.V. Money. Harden kept Money in that position but replaced him with professional coaches specific to each sport. These included Stan Albeck for basketball and Frosty Ferzacca for football, and recruited players from across the Midwest to play for the Wildcats. Not only did the size of the teams grow but they started attracting larger audiences and the sporting contest became recruitment tools for the university.
K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base
In April 1956, K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base opened just 10 miles south of Marquette. As the Cold War was heating up with the Soviet Union, the Air Force was placing long range bomber bases along the northern border of the country to respond to any threats. The base became home to the Strategic Air Command’s 4042d Strategic Bomber Wing and later the 526th Bombardment Squadron and 932d Air Refueling Station.
With the base came a major increase in population to the region, even if most of it was located on the base itself. Over 6,000 people were living on the base by the mid-1960s. Because of the close proximity to Northern, the university’s enrollment was definitely impacted by the base personnel, spouses and dependents who were looking to gain a college education.
The Mackinac Bridge
With the opening of the Mackinac Bridge in 1957, the ability to travel from the Lower to the Upper Peninsula was made much easier. Up to this time, a person would have to wait for extended periods of time to take a ferry across the Straits of Mackinac. Though crossing the Straits was still a very common thing, the frequency of people crossing grew exponentially after the Bridge opened.
From 1923 to 1957, about 12 million cars crossed the Straits of Mackinac on the ferries. This averages out to about 353,000 cars a year. The 12 millionth car crossed the Mackinac Bridge only 8 years after its opening, which means an average of 1.5 million each year. This number would grow exponentially in the coming decades. So there is no doubt that the Bridge encouraged more students to attend colleges in the Upper Peninsula.
The Baby Boom
There is no doubt that the Baby Boom (that period of accelerated birth rates from 1946 to 1964) would play a major role in the huge growth of Northern during the mid and late 1960s. But Northern was growing even before the “boomers” began attending college.
During the period from 1955 to 1964 (the year the first “boomers” descended on Northern), the enrollment at Northern had already grown from 888 students to 3,551 in the fall of 1963. This growth in part was due to the factors stated earlier but by the late 1950s, the “boomers” were in elementary and secondary schools across the nation. The need for teachers was greater than ever and there was a major push to recruit and train new educators.
In the Educational Research Bulletin of 1951, researchers R.H. Eliason and Earl W. Anderson wrote:
…the nation will need at least eight hundred thousand new elementary-school teachers within the next ten years to provide for replacements and to meet the needs of increased enrollments, but that the number of high-school teachers needed annually will decline until 1952, increase slightly thereafter until 1956, and then expand rapidly until I960. It was estimated that each year during the present decade there will be an increase of at least one million pupils and by 1959-60 there will be ten million five hundred thousand more pupils than were in our schools in 1946-47.
Being historically a teaching college, Northern was in a position to benefit from this demand for educators and this was one of the reasons that it was able to get funding from Lansing for expansion projects in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
By 1964, the first “boomers” began arriving on campus and there is no doubt the impact this has on enrollment. From 1964 to 1970, the newly christened Northern Michigan University saw an increase of nearly 200% from 4,291 students to 8,272. Though the other former “normal” schools in Michigan (Central, Eastern and Western) also saw enormous growth. However, Northern’s growth 1950 to 1970 outpaced them all. Northern’s enrollment grew by almost 900% during this period, where Central grew just over 800%, Eastern 700% and Western only 350%. So where the Baby Boom played a role in this growth, the other factors named earlier in the article probably played a role in its greater expansion.
Draft Deferments
In August 1964, the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that began the escalation of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Across the nation, young men graduating from high school were concerned they would be drafted into military service and sent to Vietnam. Over the next several years, many young men took advantage of college deferments to avoid being drafted. Scholars David Card and Thomas Lemieux stated in a 2000 paper on college deferments, stated that men who received a college degree were only 1/3 as likely to serve in the military. However, since men were still eligible to be drafted until they were 26, many were draft eligible after receiving their degree unless they enrolled in graduate school.
We find a strong link between the risk of induction faced by a cohort of men and their enrollment and completed education relative to women. We estimate that draft avoidance raised college attendance rates by 4-6 percentage points in the late 1960s, and raised the fraction of men born in the late 1940s with a college degree by up to 2 percentage points.
However, this was based on a nation-
wide study, and there were certainly places in the country where there was a more active resistance to the draft than Northern Michigan. When studying the stats, we find that in 1965 the number of men enrolling at Northern increased by almost 800 compared to 1964. The trend continued until 1967, when it reached 4,456, an increase of 58%. In contrast, the enrollment of women at NMU during this same period was 43% (1,478 to 2,629). However, from 1967 until 1971, the enrollment of men at Northern remained steady but for women jumped another 38% (2,629 to 3,646).
Whereas these statistics show some correlation between enrollment and the Vietnam War, after 1967, the numbers of male students largely level off. Part of the reason may have been that with the introduction of the Lottery Draft in 1969, fewer men were being drafted and inducted into the service. Also, they were only eligible to be drafted in that one year after being selected, so for many young men, college enrollment was less necessary to avoid the draft. During this same time (1967-1971), the enrollment of women jumped 38% at Northern and would continue to increase at a faster rate than men until the mid-1970s. There was a bit of a drop in male enrollment after 1971, but there is no evidence that this was driven by changes in the draft system.
Sources:
Central Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan University Archives
“Investigations in Teacher Supply and Demand Reported in 1950”
Author(s): R. H. Eliassen and Earl W. Anderson
Source: Educational Research Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Apr. 18, 1951), pp. 97-104+112
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
“Going to College to Avoid the Draft: The Unintended Legacy of the Vietnam War”
David Card, University of California Berkeley; Thomas Lemieux, University of British Columbia, December 2000