ON THE MALL
CAMPUS LIFE
The flurry of students registering for classes in 1948 paid tuition and fees totalling $208 for the academic year.
The Postwar Campus Crunch 75 Years Ago, a GI Bill-Driven Influx Led to Bunks in the Armory, Classrooms in the Gym and Crowds in the Coliseum
ouring another 7,300 students onto UMD’s campus would be a noticeable bump even to today’s enrollment of 40,000-plus. But 75 years ago, that total left the campus positively teeming with Terps. Starting in 1946, a year after World War II’s end, the population here exploded, tripling from the previous year and almost quintupling from two years prior. That was thanks in large part to the 1944 GI Bill, which, among other benefits, covered college tuition for returning veterans. (Of the record 7,300 enrolled Terps in 1946, 4,400 had served.)
P
8
T E R P. U M D . E D U
“There’s more of everything: more men, more staff, more classes, more crowds at dances and games, more clubs, more fraternity and sorority members, more dormitories, and more studying,” read a Diamondback article from that year. With campus a skeleton of what it is now—its heart back then was Morrill Quad, and a primitive McKeldin Mall was still known as the Quadrangle— UMD scrambled to accommodate the influx, getting creative to house, teach and engage its suddenly plentiful population in university life.—ad
A surplus of male students stuffed into makeshift housing in the Armory, also known as the Veterans Barracks Unit.
P H OTOS CO U RT ESY O F U N I V E R S I T Y A RC H I V ES
