Education: College, Who Needs It?

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¶ Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Mich., which offers associate degrees in automobile repair and body mechanics, has so many applicants that it cannot admit new students to such programs until September 1973. Its enrollment has grown by 25% in two years.

¶ Evergreen State College in Olympia. Wash., which opened with about 1,000 students last year, encourages students to contract with faculty members on what to study. For example, one group agreed to design a municipal park for the city of Lacey. The college has no grades, no departmental requirements and expects to almost double its enrollment by next fall.

Some of these innovations may turn out to be only passing fads, but for the moment they seem to serve a need. Insofar as the drop in enrollments will force schools to reconsider their goals, Peterson believes "the fact that students are not accepting a college education and a degree uncritically any more will have salutary effects on higher education." Thus, after flexing their muscles in campus demonstrations for several years, students may find that their real power lies not on the picket line but in the registrars' offices.

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Another critic of the educational Establishment is Oscar Handlin, professor of history at Harvard. At Brooklyn College's commencement exercises last week, he commiserated with the graduates, saying that 16 years in a classroom is simply too long. Noting that their ancestors were considered men and women at age 13 or 14 and "had tested their powers well before they were out of their teens," Handlin said: "Nothing real happens to those lapped in comfortable dependence and shielded by beneficent institutions against exposure to the elements." Colleges, Handlin concluded, are actually killing education. "In the 1970s we sentence more of our youth to more years in school than ever before in history, so that never before have Americans been as poorly educated as now."