Meyer Jacobstein - Academic Career

Academic Career

After attending public schools in Rochester, New York, He attending the University of Rochester and graduated from Columbia University in 1904. Jacobstein pursued postgraduate courses at the same university in economics and political science and became a special agent in the Bureau of Corporations and Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C., in 1907. Between 1909 and 1913, he worked as an assistant professor of economics at the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks and, one year later, became professor of economics in the University of Rochester. Jacobstein was a director in emergency employment management at the University of Rochester under the auspices of the War Industry Board from 1916 to 1918.

Writing in 1912 about the Aldrich plan for a National Reserve Association, Meyer Jacobstein, assistant professor of economics at the University of North Dakota, encouraged North Dakota's bankers, however unsuccessfully, to leave their rural prejudices behind and consider the greater good of the entire banking industry:

“The average country banker is always more or less suspicious of the city banker. As the Aldrich bill bears the name of an unpopular easterner, who is generally believed to be working in the interest of a group of eastern capitalists, it is not unnatural that North Dakota bankers should approach this proposed legislation with considerable timidity and suspicion. It will be well for the rural banker, however, to dispossess himself of this native prejudice and withhold judgment until he has made a careful and conscientious examination of the bill.”