College, Who Needs It?

It is clear from their cries of gloom and doom that a number of colleges and universities are endangered by falling enrollments. In fact, according to a study by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education published this week, 110,000 freshman places in four-year institutions went unfilled last fall, 24% more than the year before. Are economic circumstances the major reason for those empty seats? Not according to the author of the report, Richard Peterson, a research psychologist for the Educational Testing Service.

Far more important, Peterson argues, is a fundamental change in the attitude toward college of white, middle-class youngsters. He sees signs that "a college education is not needed for what they consider the good life. More and more, they feel that they can live satisfactorily without a college degree." While some may simply be dropping out, or not going in the first place, Peterson believes that even more have a new-found desire for "nononsense" job training offered at vocational schools.

Shifts. Actually, in spite of the missing freshmen, the total enrollment figure is still growing, owing to the new popularity of two-year public colleges and graduate schools.* There is also a marked increase in the number of part-time students. While middle-class students are dropping out, or "stopping out," of college, blue-collar and minority students, who see education as their best means of access to the middle class, are taking their places. The number of Chicanes attending college increased by 19.1% last year, and blacks by 17.2% (although enrollment in black-studies courses fell by 8%). Women's enrollment rose too, by 5.1%.

The shifting student population is a costly matter to many institutions. California's huge, 19-campus state college and university system lost not only $1,000,000 in tuition when its fulltime enrollment declined by 4,530 this year, but another $2.9 million in state support, which fluctuates according to the number of students enrolled. To recruit new students, some colleges have resorted to colorful brochures, radio commercials and high-pressure salesmanship. At the University of Southern California, professors themselves are making follow-up phone calls to prospective students, and the appeals to ordinary high school graduates have been compared to the recruiting of athletes in previous years.

Innovations. Enrollment figures seem to indicate that to attract students, colleges should consider ways to accommodate stop-outs, special programs for minority students, more vocational training and new interdisciplinary curriculums. Largely because they lack the money, few schools have made such changes. Some that have, however, are flourishing. Three examples:

P: In 1968 the University of Wisconsin focused the entire academic program at its Green Bay campus on environmental problems and saw enrollment there more than double to 3,450 this year. Students major in such broad topics as Ecosystems Analysis, for example, in which traditional subjects like biology and chemistry are related to the problems of controlling pollution.

P: 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.

P: 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."

* Peterson's conclusions are based on evidence from 1,158 two- and four-year campuses, nearly half the U.S. total.

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