UNIVERSITIES
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A tide of rising expectations in learning is sweeping the U.S. At the turn of the century, universal grade-school education was considered a high enough achievement, as was a high school diploma by World War II. Now the day is fast approaching when some form of college-level learning will be the national norm—and the M.A. today carries little more prestige than the bachelor's degree did a few years ago. The burden of quenching this thirst for learning is being borne primarily by the nation's huge public systems of higher education, which are expanding facilities, establishing branches, and blanketing their states with new campuses in an unprecedented explosion of growth.
Public universities have been a vital force in America's higher learning since the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which gave every state federal lands to support the creation of colleges devoted to vocational training and agricultural research. But these schools have grown faster in the past five years than in any similar period in their history, and in enrollment the public colleges and universities today clearly outstrip the nation's 1,200 private ones. As recently as 1950, the two sectors of higher education had almost equal enrollments; today more than two-thirds of all college students are on a public campus. Educators estimate that in the next decade eight of every ten students entering college will be on a public campus.
Texas-Size Growth. Even established public multiversities are building in frantic fashion. The University of California (current enrollment: 95,320, which will grow to 140,000 by 1975) adds 8,000 students a year—the equivalent of Yale's student body. At its crowded, overgrown Berkeley campus, steelworkers clinging to an open I beam are as much a part of the Sproul Plaza scene as are the hippie protesters. Texas-size is the right phrase for that state's major public university, which has spread to ten campuses in seven cities with 52,631 students, 1,500 teachers.
Nowhere is growth more dramatic than in New York, which did not even have a state university 20 years ago. Today the State University of New York (known familiarly as S.U.N.Y. and pronounced soonee) is the fastest growing, best-financed and most ambitious system of public higher education in the land. Enrollment has grown from 47,634 in 1960 to 139,149 now, and will reach 290,400 in seven years. In the past six years, New York has spent $1 billion on construction; nearly $2 billion will be spent by 1975. This month, S.U.N.Y. Chancellor Samuel Gould, 57, a low-keyed visionary with a deep conviction that his school is destined for greatness, will go before the state legislature with a request for a 1968 budget of $479.1 million.
Bucolic Aggie. Thriving new public universities are also popping up in other unexpected places. In Massachusetts, where private education has long gone unchallenged, the state university has burgeoned from a bucolic "aggie" school with 1,788 students in 1947 to 11,784 today; its Amherst campus glistens with nearly $200 million worth of postwar buildings. The University of Wisconsin suddenly finds its own huge enrollment (54,997 students) nearly matched by the combined enrollment of the Wisconsin State Universities' nine campuses, most of which were teachers colleges a few years ago. Illinois is