One big reason that banking is a profession instead of just a business is the proliferation of bankers schools.
A terrific amount of effort has been devoted to programs ranging from the ABA's national Stonier Graduate School of Banking to schools run by state banking associations on specific topics such as consumer credit, mortgage operations, and personnel management.
The major schools used to go beyond narrow banking issues to teach about economics, investments, international finance, even psychology.
Today most bank officers who attend these schools have had a college education or at least are taking courses at night. But in the Depression, when Stonier was started, most bankers did not have such opportunities.
For many, the three years of two-week sessions they spent in New Brunswick at Rutgers University was their only taste of college campus life. And they loved it. Many would mention Rutgers in their wills and stress it in their biographies. And they talked with great pride about having gone to Rutgers.
(When IBM decided it had to train its banking salespeople to understand bank operations that had nothing to do with computers, it came to Rutgers for a program like Stonier.)
Most banking schools required a thesis for graduation, to make the bankers appreciate how much effort goes into the written word. But the requirements were eased for those to whom this was the first college-type experience.
Smaller banks with no training programs used these bankers schools as the basic educational opportunity for their staffs. Larger banks that had training programs would send people anyway - to make friends with community bankers, who might become correspondents.
The people who ran the Graduate School of Savings Banking at Brown University met with the wives of new students. They explained how hard their husbands would be working for the next three years - the late nights away from home at the bank or library - to discourage suspicions of hanky-panky.
I said husbands, and not wives. In the first 30 or so years of banking schools, no women were admitted. For the first five sent to Stonier, the privilege was largely a substitute for promotions and raises.
Well, banking schools have changed.
Many banks cannot afford to send people away for six weeks, so many schools have condensed their programs. In addition, since most of the students now have college degrees, the schools' focus has become narrower. And community banks now keep their reserves at the Fed instead of money-center banks, so the sport of fishing for correspondents at banking schools has died out.
Still, many bankers are proud of Stonier, Swigsbe, Prochnow, Pacific Coast, and the other banking schools. Their talk reminds me of a time when this business was more social and students sent to Rutgers would propose such thesis topics as "Financing the Roadhouse Industry in New Brunswick - an Empirical Study."
Mr. Nadler, an American Banker contributing editor, is a professor emeritus of finance at Rutgers University Graduate School of Management in Newark, N.J.
