The Future Is Public

Whether public or private, most U.S. colleges are in such desperate financial straits that by the year 2000 they will be almost totally dependent on the Federal Government for support. So last week argued Alan Pifer, president of New York's Carnegie Corporation, in a frank and chilling analysis of the nation's academic future. Speaking in Minneapolis, Pifer warned that it was high time for educators in the public and private sectors to stop their selfish factional disputes and get together to help shape new national policies on which federal funding must be based.

Pifer aired his views before a group largely resistant to that kind of future: the Association of American Colleges, whose 888 members include 730 of the nation's private schools. He conceded that, to many educators, talk of federal dominance in funding and planning sounds like "unAmerican, unconstitutional, and dangerous nonsense." And he agreed that the freedom of private institutions has provided much of the dynamism of higher education. But he also warned his audience of college executives that the nation "can no longer afford the luxury of an unplanned, wasteful, chaotic approach" in which freedom often means "freedom to duplicate what others could do better, to perform useless, even meretricious functions."

Pifer urged the creation of a long-range planning center for higher education, drawing heavily on university advisers and given authority to guide federal policy. Its first task would be to seek agreement on how federal aid should be distributed. He rejected the idea of broad, unselective grants to all institutions on the ground that this would merely "perpetuate, only on a more costly scale, everything that is wrong" with higher education now. One. of his proposals was for the designation of a few high-quality existing campuses as "national universities," which would be given preferential support for their scholars and facilities.

Although educators may regret it, Pifer concluded, the trend toward federal funding is irreversible. The Government supplied nearly one-fourth of the $16.8 billion that all colleges spent last year; by 1975, he predicted, this may climb to 50%. Eventually, he suggested, private donors will give up, or support only highly specialized projects, while federal taxes pick up the main burden and local and state revenues meet the expanding needs of the lower levels of education.

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