Harvesting Neglect in New Jersey

PUBLIC POLICY

Residents of New Jersey sometimes liken their state to a keg of beer tapped at both ends, with New York and Philadelphia drawing off the state's talent, energy and brains. The residue is a flat, zingless brew that satisfies no one. Among the dregs is higher education --a field in which rich New Jersey has the poorest showing of effort among all the 50 states.

Now there is a glimmer of hope that New Jersey may be about to create a meaningful system of public higher education. Presently, the system consists of Rutgers University with 12,257 full-time students, one college of engineering in Newark, and six obscure state colleges, each with about 3,000 students--nearly all enrolled in teacher training. Buoyed by his smashing reelection, Governor Richard Hughes hopes to get legislative approval of an income tax that will produce $180 million a year, spend $30 million of it on higher education. At the same time, a broadly based citizens' committee headed by Princeton President Robert F. Goheen is generating pressure to get the state cracking on a new system.

Oblivious to Need. Some sad statistics tell the need: New Jersey has the eighth highest per capita income in the U.S.; yet it ranks 48th in its per capita support of higher education, ahead of only Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. While most states send only about 20% of their students to colleges in other states, New Jersey exports 55% of its high school graduates--leading educators to dub New Jersey "The Cuckoo State," after the bird that plants its eggs in other nests to hatch.

New Jersey's failure can be traced to an alliance of indifferent commuters and conservative farmers, whose resistance to taxation has made New Jersey one of only three states without a broad-based tax, such as a state sales or income tax. Oblivious to the growing needs in education, the New Jersey legislature made only one appropriation for college construction between 1930 and 1947; that was to relocate an aging teachers' college.

Brewery Classrooms. Even Rutgers is poorly supported. At the main campus in New Brunswick, its history department conducts classes in a converted century-old house and a more ancient prep-school building. A Rutgers branch in Newark operates in a converted brewery and a former razor-blade factory. Salaries are tied to state civil service scales, adequate for instructors but, at a maximum of $16,000, too low to keep top professors. Raided by the State University of New York and others, New Jersey last year made an exception and offered a few professors up to $24,000, but, insists Rutgers President Mason Gross, "we have just not been competitive."

Overcrowded Rutgers had to turn away more than 5,000 qualified students last year. Graduate education suffers particularly. New Jersey offers no work at all in architecture or veterinary medicine. Until the state acquired Catholic Seton Hall's medical school one year ago, it operated no school of medicine or dentistry--and even that is facing eviction from its Jersey City quarters in a dispute over rental fees. New Jersey still has only one large law school. One consequence is that brain-oriented industries are leaving the state. Chemical firms in New Jersey need about 200 new chemistry Ph.D.s a year; Rutgers turns out only about 15.

Pain Ahead. The meager state system is buttressed by such private schools as Ivy League Princeton, 25-year-old Fairleigh Dickinson, Methodist Drew University and Seton Hall. But only about 15% of Princeton's undergraduate enrollment (3,181 this year) comes from within the state. Fairleigh Dickinson has about 5,500 full-time students, Drew has only 1,000. Seton Hall, with fewer than 4,000 undergrads, is noted mainly for its basketball teams.

To end the state's college scandal, the Goheen committee warns, New Jersey will have to be able to handle 138,000 college students ten years from now, and must raise $427 million in capital funds and $126 million in annual operating funds to do it. State educators are working on an expansion plan, seem to be leaning toward advocating two new colleges, a series of two-year community colleges, and enlarging Rutgers with perhaps three new undergraduate divisions. Rutgers will open a new medical school next fall.

That kind of expansion means stiff new taxes and painful bond issues for New Jersey residents. Yet the pain is self-inflicted for, as Goheen puts it: "We are about to reap the harvest of years of neglect."

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