1956: University of Chicago Begins Program to Educate Chileans in Economics

A joint project is started in which students from Chile will be sent to learn economics at the University of Chicago using funding for tuition and other expenses from the US government as well as private organizations such as the Ford Foundation. The University of Chicago’s Department of Economics is at this time a bastion of strict adherence to pro-free market thought. The chairman of this department, Theodore W. Schultz, came up with this plan along with an official from the US government during a meeting in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. Schultz himself stated that he desired that the countries of the third world, “work out their economic salvation by relating to us and by using our way of achieving their economic development.” By 1970, some 100 students from Chile will have sought advanced degrees from the University of Chicago. [Klein, 2007, pp. 59-60]