Universities: Expensive, Expansive Equality

Concerned that U.S. colleges and universities may not be healthy enough to handle the challenges of the next dec ade, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education last week prescribed some preventive medicine. What is needed, said the commission, is nothing less than a $10 billion annual increase in federal spending, plus the creation of 550 new colleges. Without that expensive and expansive dose, the 14-man committee of educators and businessmen reported, the U.S. will fall far short of meeting a vital need for more and better higher education for more and more students of all income groups.

Formed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching last year to make long-range recommendations on a developing crisis of "wastefulness" and "chaos" in higher education, the commission soon decided to change its ground rules. Financial problems facing higher education were so urgent that the commissioners decided short-range solutions were needed—now. Thus last week's report (others will be issued later) focused specifically on the next eight years,* on the problems that will reach U.S. campuses with the college candidates produced by the post-World War II baby boom.

An Incentive to Compete. The basic recommendation calls for an expanded program of federal "educational opportunity grants" to 1,000,000 students who could not otherwise afford college. Under the terms of the proposed grants, direct federal assistance would go to students rather than colleges. As a result, colleges would find themselves competing for students. The law of the marketplace would prevail, and institutions would have extra incentive to at tract students by making courses more responsive to their needs and desires. Since tuition alone no longer covers the cost of college instruction, additional federal assistance would be funneled directly to the colleges in proportion to the number of extra students.

Unless such steps are taken to provide greater equality of opportunity for higher education, the commission argues, an important reservoir of national talent will go untapped. Today, said Chairman Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, "a young man or woman whose family's income is in the top half of the national income range has three times the chance to get a college education as one whose family is in the bottom half." The commission's figures show that while 19 out of 20 of the brightest students in the top 25% income group get to college, only 10 out of 20 of the promising students in the lowest 25% income group get there. "The proportion of Negroes in the American college population," the report notes, "is less than half the proportion of Negroes in the population as a whole."

Nor is money for colleges and students enough, said the commission. More federal funds must be provided for counseling potential college students and guiding them toward higher education. The Government must also pay for a talent search among ill-prepared students from second-rate colleges who have the intellect for graduate studies, and subsidize studies to help them qualify.