The Albany Chamber of Commerce’s 1923 booklet on education in Albany laid out an impressive and highly confusing set of facts and figures to relate the importance of education in the city, to show that “as a business, education here surpasses, both in investment and in the amount of its payroll, that of any other single enterprise.”
First, it tallied up the capital investment in public, parochial, private and professional schools, then added in the $6 million value of the State Education Building just for good measure and to nearly double the value of all school buildings to $13 million. Then it asserted that the combined capital of the 382 industries in the city amounted to $39,529,000, meaning that the investment in education was “approximately one-third as much capital as is invested in all industries, or to reverse this form, one dollar is invested in property producing education for every three dollars producing a commercial product.”
It then broke down payrolls to make a similar point, that one dollar was spent for education to every $5.80 spent in industry; if you only looked at teachers’ wages, it was a dollar for every $4.67. Adding to that was the value of students coming from other places.
In case you wondered, the annual budget for the city of Albany in 1922 broke down like this:
| Education | $913,331.00 |
| Police | 395,461.50 |
| Fire | 392,230.00 |
| Other items | 1,315,037.63 |
| Total | $3,016,060.13 |