The Curse of Bigness

State universities in the U.S. welcome almost every native son who has a high-school diploma and a craving for higher education. That policy, together with the great G.I. boom, has loaded them up to the rafters. Last week President Robert Gordon Sproul, whose University of California teaches more students (50,109) than any other in the U.S., questioned whether "everybody come, everybody served" was such a good idea after all.

Said Sproul: "[The] function of the university . . . does not require . . . that every high-school graduate must be guaranteed a bachelor's degree. The chief handicap of American higher education . . . has been our too easy admission to university training of large numbers of students . . . not properly qualified by native ability, or previous training, or even social attitude. . . .

"The university should . . . lay more definite restrictions upon entering students. But it will never be able to do so until there are enough alternative institutions providing socially acceptable opportunities for those not qualified to do work on the university level. . . ."

The "G.I. boom" had other educators worried last week, but for a different reason: they were afraid it meant bankruptcy for their colleges. In School and Society, Colgate's P.R.O., W. Emerson Reck, reported the odd plight of U.S. colleges which are going into the red because they have too many customers.

Explained Reck: since tuition fees cover only half the cost of a student's education, every extra student means that the colleges must dig deeper into their endowment income to make up the difference. With expenses soaring and the interest rate slumping, the difference is getting wider & wider.

Many hard-pressed colleges have raised their tuitions, and more will soon follow suit. But if tuitions get much higher, Reck warns, middle-class Americans will not be able to meet them. Possible ways out for the colleges: more generous gifts from old grads; federal subsidies with no strings attached.

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