The Student Shortage

For graduating high school seniors, the once-traditional spring/summer struggle to get into college--any college --appears to have gone the way of the draft and campus demonstrations. With fall sessions at some schools only weeks away, the National Association of College Admissions Counselors reported last week that there are still about 500,000 openings for freshmen and transfer students at colleges and universities across the country. The figures mark the second straight year of declining college enrollments. California alone has at least 40,000 vacancies. Even in New England, some 25,000 places are going begging, although the area's Ivy League and other prestigious schools can still pick and choose as much as they please.

Officials attribute the decline to a number of factors. The 1970s have brought both the close of the postwar baby boom that swelled the ranks of college-age youth in the 1960s and the end of the Viet Nam conflict, which drove many young people to seek shelter on campus from the Selective Service. Vocational schools are becoming more popular, while fewer parents are willing or able to cope with rising college costs (the current annual average at private four-year schools: $3,504).

Many institutions, especially state colleges, overexpanded in the 1960s. They now find themselves underutilized.

Says Nancy Barber of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education: "Colleges will have to find other ways to put their facilities to use. Hopefully there will be more recruitment of the poor, minorities and the elderly."

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