The Art Academy has always been a small school with intimate class sizes, allowing for personal interaction with instructors. In that sense, the school is much the same as it has always been. After having 30 students in the first year, in 1872 the school had 465 students taking day and evening classes, then enrollment generally stayed in the 300 to 400 range through 1927. Despite a spike in tuition from $25 a year to $100, the school topped 500 students each of the next four years before the impact of the Great Depression finally caught up. Enrollment plummeted until bottoming out at 193 students in 1940,
a significant 62 percent drop enrollment leveled out to about 150 to 250 students a year, which the school has maintained since. But that post-war boom helped change the character of the school and some of the students of that period emerged as major artists.
