The College Depression

U.S. campuses face their "greatest crisis in the 330 years since the founding of Harvard," says Clark Kerr, head of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. The problem is not radical student protest; it is a radical shortage of money. Though academics have always made a practice of crying poverty, Kerr's commission last week issued a sobering report (the latest in a series of impressive campus analyses), which offered unusually specific evidence that the financial squeeze is getting worse.

In recent years at least 21 colleges and universities have gone out of business or been absorbed by larger ones. After two decades of expansion, the report estimates, 540 additional campuses are cutting back; 1,000 others may soon be forced to follow suit. In fact, about 77% of U.S. collegians now attend schools that are either "headed for trouble" or already "in financial difficulty." Moreover, these hard-pressed campuses include such eminent institutions as Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan and Stanford.

Outstripped Income. Based on an analysis of 41 representative private and public campuses (U.S. total: 2,500), the Carnegie study was directed by Dr. Earl F. Cheit, a Berkeley professor of business administration who once served as

Berkeley's executive vice chancellor. As Cheit explains it, the rising costs of recent improvements (better salaries, courses, scholarships, community service) have increasingly outstripped income from endowments, gifts, grants and Government aid.

Cheit found that some campuses still have the capacity to expand. Examples: Gulf Coast Junior College, Howard University and the University of North Carolina. The healthy institutions are chiefly those with modest salaries, scholarships, and research programs.

Slashed Quality. Many schools cited in the report have already protested that cutbacks have not hurt their academic quality. Indeed, the first casualties have been frills and amenities. Beloit has abolished its summer theater, Tulane its laundry and printing press. Many colleges have stopped washing their windows and trimming their hedges. Other reductions include questionable "institutes" and programs added by academic empire builders during the last decade's scramble for prestige. One possible gain: aloof researchers are being forced back into teaching. But some slashes may cut into academic quality.

St. Louis University has scrapped its schools of aeronautical science and dentistry, letting 40 faculty members go in the process; at Harvard, programs have shrunk in the schools of design, divinity and education. Berkeley is doing without research institutes in social sciences and earthquakes; Tulane has dropped six graduate programs. Predominantly black Fisk is phasing out its Afro-American Institute. For every cutback mentioned in the report, says Cheit, there are many more at other institutions. Numerous schools are reducing urban-service programs, library books and scholarships for poor or minority-group students.

Cheit chides administrators for being overeager to keep up appearances and duck hard realities. Many of them, he says, are still not willing to organize their priorities on a systematic basis. But he makes it clear that universities have little control over inflation--not only in dollars, but also in knowledge and students (3,000,000 more by 1980).

The Carnegie Commission argues that the long-range answer lies in new Government help--for example, a "civilian G.I. Bill" subsidizing low-income students. This would allow both public and private campuses to charge more of the full costs of education without becoming retreats for the rich. Last spring the Nixon Administration proposed one version of such a plan, but congressional approval has been delayed by the preference of many state colleges for grants to institutions rather than students. Whatever the answer, says Cheit, the current trend is clear: most U.S. campuses face "serious problems of retrenchment and readjustment."

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