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.

Dangerous Problem. The commission also proposed an unusually flexible federal education loan program for all students, regardless of need, with repayments scheduled according to the borrower's post-college income, and spaced out over 30 to 40 years. Arguing that the country clearly would benefit because persons with more education earn more, and pay more taxes, the Carnegie group recommends that a National Student Loan Bank be organized to make loans of up to $2,500 per year for undergraduates and to $3,500 for graduate students.

In a special section on medical education, the report notes that the need for medical services in the U.S. is growing far faster than the supply of medical school graduates. As a result, one out of every five new doctors starting practice in the U.S. was trained abroad. Moreover, says the report, his training is often "of a distinctly lower quality than that provided in the United States." To meet that dangerous problem, the commission calls for the establishment of 20 new medical schools and the enlargement of existing ones to provide space for 75% more students by 1976. The demanding recommendations, addressed essentially to Congress and the executive branch, would increase federal aid to higher education from its present level of $3.5 billion a year to $13 billion by 1976. Private sources, the committee believes, should continue to pay half the costs, as they do now, while the burden on the states would be reduced from the present 27% to 17%. By commission calculations, the $10 billion federal increase would represent one-seventh of the expected additions to federal revenues. Although that amounts to an immense investment, says the report, it must be made "if the growth of higher education is not to be curbed at the very time that the national need demands our best ideas and intellectual skills."

* The commission chose 1976 as a target date in order to cover two presidential terms and because the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence seemed an appropriate occasion on which to stress equality of opportunity.

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