Who Should Go to College?

The U.S. likes to think its educational system as good as any in the world. That doesn't mean that the U.S. is satisfied with it. Recently, educators have been insisting, louder & louder, that it isn't anywhere near good enough. What's wrong with it? Seventeen months ago, Harry Truman appointed a commission of 28 clergymen, educators, businessmen, and editors to find out. Last week the commission, headed by the American Council on Education's President George Zook,* published the first two volumes of a six-volume report.

Objectives. The commission came to a familiar conclusion, but had some strong remedies to suggest. "For the great majority of our boys & girls," the commission said, "the kind and amount of education they can hope to attain depends not on their abilities, but on the family or community to which they happen to be born, or worse still, on the color of their skin or the religion of their parents." The U.S. must have an educational system "in which at no level. . . will a qualified individual in any part of the country encounter an insuperable economic barrier to the attainment of the education best suited to his aptitudes." The commission's recommendations :

P: The number of students at colleges and universities should be doubled (i.e., raised to more than 4,600,000) by 1960.

P: Free public education should be extended through the first two years of college. Tuition fees for the last two years should be substantially lowered. Fellowships and scholarships should be vastly expanded.

P: Educational segregation, as in the South, requiring wasteful and expensive duplicate school systems, should be eliminated as soon as possible. Quota systems on such minority groups as Jews must be abolished.

Objections. But more education for more people was only part of the problem. What kind of education should they get? "Too often," said the commission, "a man is 'educated' in that he has acquired competence in some particular occupation, yet falls short of that human wholeness and civic conscience which . . . citizenship requires. . . . The unity of liberal education has been splintered by overspecialization."

Higher education "must be vested with public purpose." Thus, even research "should be devoted to the general, not the individual, welfare. . . . Old distinctions between education for living and education for making a living must be discarded. American colleges and universities can no longer consider themselves merely an instrument for producing an intellectual elite; they must become the means by which every citizen . . . is enabled and encouraged to carry his education, formal and informal, as far as his native capacities permit."

These conclusions would not be universally welcomed by U.S. educators. There are too many college students now, says Harvard Economist Seymour E. Harris.

Wrote he in the latest Harvard Alumni Bulletin: "We are fast establishing an A.B. and Ph.D. proletariat. The German parallel of frustrated educated men immediately comes to mind. . . . An examination of occupational distribution does not suggest that there are jobs which will support college graduates in employment to their liking. In 1940, professional and semiprofessional workers accounted for only 7% of all jobs. . . ."

* Some other members: Chancellor Arthur H. Compton of Washington University, President Milton Eisenhower of Kansas State College, President Ordway Tead of New York City's Board of Higher Education, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and Historian Douglas S. Freeman, editor of the Richmond (Va.) News Leader.

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