by Daniel Bell
The chief problem, in the past, has been that all projections vastly underestimated the proportion of high school youths who would go on to college, and planning was woefully inadequate. There was no “theory” about who would go to college; there was little expectation that the various states would respond so quickly to the postwar situation and expand the educational plant so rapidly.
If one is to look ahead to the year 2000 and consider the question of whether the number of educated persons will continue to match the demand, the central fact is that the college population, by and large, is still drawn principally from the middle class. As Martin Trow has remarked: “With all of the expansion of educational opportunities in the United States, there is still a very sizeable body of students who have the ability for college work but never get there. In [a study of the California state system, it was found] that nearly half (47 percent) of the high school graduates in the top 20 percent of academic ability whose fathers were manual workers did not go on to college (though some of them may after a period of working or in military service). This compares with 25 percent of the students in the same ability brackets from middle-class homes who did not go on to college.”
TABLE 3-19
Historical and Projected Relationships of Undergraduates
to the 18-21 Age Group
SOURCE: Allan M. Cartter and Robert Farrell, “Higher Education in the Last Third of the Century,” The Educational Record (Spring, 1965), p. 121.
Derived from: Column 1: Historical data from the Bureau of the Census. Projections through 1980 appear in the Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-25, No. 286 (July 1964, Series B data). After 1980, data were supplied to the American Council on Education by the Bureau of the Census. Data are as of July of the year indicated.
Column 2: Ratios for 1889-1955 are based on resident degree-credit series presented in U.S. Office of Education, Biennial Survey of Education, 1957-58, chap. 4, sec. 1, p. 7. Ratios for 1960 and 1964 are derived from U.S.O.E. Opening Fall Enrollment series and Enrollment for Advanced Degrees.
NOTE: S1 assumes a constant ratio at the 1964 level—an unlikely state of affairs, and one already disproved by the early reports of 1965 enrollments. S2 assumes that the ratio will increase at a constant rate of 2 percent per year through 1970, then increase at a rate of 1 percent through 1975, and finally level off at its 1975 level. Sa is based on Office of Education projections through 1975, then assumes a decline in the rate of increase until a constant ratio is achieved in 1985. S4 is hyperbolic in form, rising at a constantly declining rate. S5 assumes a constant 2 percent per year increase in the attendance ratio after 1965 (which would provide a statistically possible, but improbable, ratio of more than 1.0 by the year 2010).
TABLE 3-20
Undergraduate Degree-Credit Enrollment, Fall 1960 and
Projected Through Fall 2000 (Thousands)
SOURCE: See Cartter and Farrell, “Higher Education in the Last Third of the Century,” p. 122.
NOTE: Series 1 merely illustrates the effect of the growth in the size of the college-age population, indicating that undergraduate enrollments would grow from 3.3 million in 1960 to approximately 9.5 million by the end of the century even if there were no further change in attendance rates. Series 2 is a conservative estimate, rising to 11.4 millions. The authors hazard the guess that Series 3 and 4 are the more likely indicators of the magnitude of the impending expansion, with undergraduate enrollments rising to 10 million by the late 1980s, and to between 13 and 16 million by the year 2000. Series 5 is probably the outside limit for periods ten or more years ahead.
A study by John K. Folger and his associates for the Russell Sage Foundation summarized the effects of socio-economic status on educational progress by comparing two high school groups who came equally from the top fifth of their age group in academic aptitude and differed only on socio-economic status, one in the top quintile of socio-economic status, the second in the bottom quintile. The groups graduated in 1960.
Of the high socio-economic status, high-ability group of 1oo male, high school graduates: 9 did not go to college; 9 went to a junior college (3 of these also finished senior college); and 82 went to a senior college (63 of these graduated from senior college). Of the 66 who received a bachelor’s degree, 36 continued immediately in graduate or professional school.
Of the low socio-economic status, high-ability group of 100 male high school graduates: 31 did not go to college; 17 went to a junior college (5 of these also finished senior college); and 52 went to a senior college (32 of these graduated from senior college). Of the 37 who received a bachelor’s degree, 15 went on immediately to graduate or professional school.
Thus, in the early 1960s, a bright but poor boy had only about 55 percent as much chance of completing college within five years as his well-to-do counterpart, and only about 40 percent as much chance of doing post-graduate work.84
If there is going to be a continuing expansion of the proportion of high school graduates going on to college, it is clear that in the succeeding decades a larger number will have to be drawn from working class families. But why don’t the children of working-class homes go on to college? The usual assumption has been that the failure is due largely to discriminatory barriers—that working-class children could not afford to go to college, were needed as early wage earners to contribute to the family, and so on. More recently, however, some sociologists have raised the question whether working-class children really want to go on to higher education. As John Porter has posed the issue:
One of the recurring questions is whether or not mobility values are part of a common values system for the whole society, or whether they are middle-class subcultural values.... In the light of the evidence that levels of aspiration and attitudes to education vary so much by class, one wonders how it could ever be claimed that, as part of the common value system, all Americans are achievement-oriented or share in a great quest for opportunity.... The notion of common values about mobility has serious implications when social policies assume—something like the old instinct theory—that by providing certain opportunities where they did not previously exist, latent mobility aspirations and achievement motives will be triggered and the previously deprived will be brought into the mainstream of an upwardly mobile and achievement-oriented society.85
Porter is dubious about this proposition, and argues that the new stage of major industrial societies (which he calls “postmodern”) may face a shortage of highly trained manpower in consequence of these differences in values. The question is a relevant one and is not resolvable by opinion. If some of the data cited by Trow, however, are relevant, then it seems likely that going to college or not going to college is not the issue for working-class children, but what kind of college to go to. A study carried out both in the Midwest and in California on the effect of the availability of public institutions on the proportions of students from working-class families, compared to other class groups who attended college, showed that while students from professional and other white-collar backgrounds are much more likely to go to college out of town than working-class students, the students from working- and lower middle-class homes are about as likely to go to a local public junior college as are boys and girls from wealthier homes.
As Trow reports: “Where there is a local public junior college in the community, half of the boys from lower-class backgrounds went on to college, as compared with only 15% of boys from similar backgrounds living in communities with no local college. The presence of a four year state college (usually somewhat more selective, somewhat less vocational than the junior college) in the community raised college going rates among these lower-class boys to nearly a third.” 86
Predicting the future college enrollments has become increasingly hazardous. For one, now that births can be better controlled, the birth rate, paradoxically, is less predictable since couples can decide more easily if and at what time in their marriage they want children. The birth rate has be
en slowing down, but because of the broader base of the child-bearing group, the absolute number of the population may increase by about sixty to seventy million by the year 2000. The loosening of educational structures allows more persons to drop out for a while and then come back in. The shape of the labor market for college graduates itself is subject to uncertain change. Yet if a social policy decision is made to facilitate a minimum of 50 percent of all persons of college age to have access to higher education (it was about 2 percent in 1870), then certain rough predictions can be made. According to a 1971 report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, the pattern from 1960 to the year 2000 will be one of Go-Stop-Go. In the decade from 1960 to 1970, enrollments doubled. From 1970 to 1980 it will have increased by one-half. From 1980 to 1990 there will be no change in enrollments, and from 1990 to 2000 the increase will be by one-third. By 1980, there would be 12,500,000 enrollments, by 1990, 12,300,000, and by 2000, about 16,000,000. The Carnegie Commission expects that the additional new students could be mostly absorbed by 1980 (and 1990) within the existing 2800 campuses. Nor is there any further need for more research-type universities granting the Ph.D. The major growth need for the year 2000 would be in community colleges and comprehensive colleges primarily in metropolitan areas.
What can we conclude from all this? By the year 2000, the United States will have become, in gross terms, a mass knowledge society. Thirty years hence, the enrollment in higher education will be roughly ten times greater than what it was thirty years before in 1940. And where in 1940, there were roughly 150,000 in the college faculty, thirty years from now the figure will probably be ten times as large as well. By the end of this decade, the number of Ph.Ds. granted will probably level off to about 40,000 to 45,000 annually so that by the end of the century there will be about a million persons in the society holding a Ph.D. degree.
And yet such a mass itself loses its distinction and the idea of higher education in and of itself loses its elite quality. What becomes most relevant are the distinctions within the knowledge society itself. And the fact that the educational system of the society is divided, as it is, among a community college, public university and small private college system, in effect tends to repeat and perpetuate the trifurcation of an elite, privileged, and educated mass and reinforce the class divisions within the structure of the “Scientific City” itself.
INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURE
If one thinks of the major institutional sectors of the society as the polity, the economy, the intellectual system, the cultural and entertainment structures, the religious system, and the kinship system, then what is noteworthy is the high degree of dependence of the intellectual system—largely the educational system and the organization of basic research and scholarship—on government. In the economy, there is an indirect political management by government through the control of the levels of money and the rate of growth through fiscal policies, and there is, increasingly, a direct share of purchases of goods by government; yet in the economy there is also a high degree of independence of the operating units (corporations and firms), despite many government regulatory agencies. Similarly, the cultural and entertainment structures, despite the regulation of television and radio by government, are largely dependent on the market; and, in the case of serious works, to a small extent on foundations and patronage for support. The religious institutions are almost entirely dependent on private support and the family, except for welfare recipients, exists as an autonomous institution.
Educational institutions depend on the polity because of three factors: first, education has been traditionally a public function, in which the states have had primary responsibility for elementary and secondary education; second, the balance between private and public higher education in which, historically, the greater number of advanced students were educated in private schools (though a large number of the colleges were church-supported) has shifted so that today the larger number of students are in publicly supported institutions of higher learning; and third, the increasing dependence of the entire educational system on federal financing, particularly in higher education. This takes various forms—the dependence of private colleges on the government for student stipends, particularly in graduate work; the increasing use of loans from government for construction of college facilities; and the dependence of research on the federal government for its money—to the extent that about three-fourths of all research funds today are supplied by the federal government.
And yet, despite this extraordinary dependency on government, which, of course, is not unique to the United States, there is little or no centralized control of the education system. In France, for example, a centralized ministry is responsible for uniform curricula, examinations, and all (except denominational) universities. There is also in the United States little organized direction of research and planned allocations, such as, for example, the academy system provides in the Soviet Union. Instead, we have what is called “administrative pluralism,” which is sometimes a euphemism for disorganization and disarray. There is no centralized research budget, or any set of coordinated policies. Responsibilities are distributed throughout the federal departments, in addition to a host of independent agencies such as the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science and Technology, and the like. In 1968, Alan Pifer summed up this high degree of decentralization in the organization of education:
Looking at the “structure” of higher education, [an outside] observer would discover some 2,200 institutions of widely varying types and wildly varying standards. He would find that some of these institutions are publicly controlled, some privately, with some of the latter church-related and some not. He would also find 50 separate state systems of higher education, all different, and with the exception of some regional coordination, not related to each other in such a way as to add up collectively to anything like a national system of education.... Our observer would be even more surprised when he looked at the role of the national government in regard to higher education. Here he would discover: that there is no clearly expressed and clearly understood federal role ... that the federal role in higher education (with the exception of that mandated in the Land-Grant Acts) has over the years been only a by-product of other federal purposes, such as the support of research or discharge of responsibilities to war veterans or to the disadvantaged.... Only recently has the federal government begun to support higher education for its own sake and in so doing only on a hesitant, fragmented basis that could best be described as backing into a federal policy.... At the present time every federal department except the Post Office and Treasury and at least 16 independent agencies have direct relationships with institutions of higher education and that the Office of Education alone is responsible for administering over 60 separate programs in this area under the authorization of 15 different legislative enactments. Finally, he would find out that there is no single place in the federal government where all this activity is directed or coordinated, or its collective impact on the colleges and universities even assessed—no locus of concern about the health and welfare of higher education per se.87
This picture, which has become the conventional view of American higher education, fails, however, to indicate the degree of concentration of resources—that is, students and research money—in a comparatively small number of universities. If we trace the degree of concentration from the abundance of statistics, we find that of the 2,500 institutions of higher education in the United States, there are only 159 universities. Attending these 159 universities, however, were nearly one-third of all students in the United States and nearly one-half of all students in four-year degree institutions.88
The concentration can be traced by another measure. Between 1940 and 1960 college enrollment increased from 1.4 million to 3.6 million, but institutions which were founded after 1940 accounted for only about 10 percent of the increase. Thus existing institutions approximately doubled in size. But the large universities acco
unted for the greatest concentrations of all. In 1964, thirty-five universities, or only 1.6 percent of the number of all institutions, accounted for more than 20 percent of student enrollments. A hundred and four schools, or less than 5 percent of the total, accounted for 40 percent of the enrollments (Table 3-21).
TABLE 3-21
Number of Institutions of Higher Education, by Size of Degree-Credit
Enrollment, United States and Outlying Areas, Fall 1969
SOURCE: Digest of Educational Statistics, 1970, U.S. Office of Education, 1970, p. 85.
Within the university world itself, there is a high degree of concentration. Of the 2,500 colleges and universities in the country, one hundred carry out more than 93 percent of the research. And, within this circle, twenty-one universities carried out 54 percent of all university research, and ten universities carried out 38 percent of university research.89
Given this degree of concentration, one can say that on the elite level, there is a national system of education and university research, characterized by a number of indicators. These are the universities which are most responsive to “national needs,” in that they under-take such diverse work as the expansion of foreign-area training (Russian, Chinese, Latin American studies), oceanography, space, health, urban affairs; these are also the universities which have direct ties with government, often by the loan of personnel not only for high-level administrative jobs but also for such diverse tasks as for-sign aid, economic development, technical assistance, and the like; within this university system there is a high degree of mobility and a strengthening of professional ties between key persons.
