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The rise of the public university is not merely in buildings, budgets and bodies. It is growing just as sharply in its brainpower. Good students who might once have shunned public institutions are now competing to get in. The University of Massachusetts, for example, had 17,000 applications for this year's freshman class, could take only the best 3,000. Among the 99 members of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, more than 80% of the current enrollment ranked in the top half of their high school classes—and nearly a third were in the top tenth. A single D on the four-year high school record of a California student can kill his chances of getting into the university.
Best of Both. Although salaries at state universities still lag behind those at the top private schools, the best public institutions can now get the best professors—a fact witnessed by academic recognition of Berkeley as a finer all-round school on the graduate level than Harvard. Massachusetts now pays full professors an average $17,300—and President John Lederle is an aggressive raider of private-university faculties. Among his recent catches: University of Chicago Mathematician Marshall Harvey Stone, N.Y.U. Botanist Oswald Tippo, Yale Physicist Robert Gluckstern and lohns Hopkins Astrophysicist John D. Strong, who brought $1,000,000 in equipment with him. "We're not trying to create an Ivy League college or a Big Ten here," says Lederle. "We'll take the best of both and do better."
To handle the overflow from increasingly selective universities, the states have converted nearly every teachers college in the U.S. into a broader four-year liberal arts institution. The state-college system in California, with 18 campuses in operation and four more in the works, has 142,000 students, thus is twice as large as the nine-campus University of California. Some of these colleges, such as freewheeling San Francisco State and San Diego State, justifiably claim that they are better than many a public university elsewhere—and, in fact, are bitter about their lack of university status. Pennsylvania maintains a strong system of 13 state colleges (including famed Slippery Rock), which have grown from 15,979 students ten years ago to 47,987 today.
But even the growth of state universities and colleges is not enough to handle the current enrollment pressure. New two-year junior colleges are now opening at a rate of 65 a year—well above the 1966 rate of one a week. Since 1960, enrollment has almost tripled in the J.C.s to 1,650,000. California has 80 of them, all open to every high school graduate free of charge—and 72% of all freshmen in the state are now in one of them. Florida enrolls nearly 100,000 students in its 26 J.C.s; Illinois has completed 27 of them for 82,000 students, is planning 13 more. Texas has 68 spotted throughout the state, and Dallas alone is planning seven campuses to handle 70,000 students.
Modeling & Mortuary. The junior colleges serve a number of academic functions. They provide a basic general education for the two-year student, give thousands of late-blooming youngsters a second shot at qualifying for admission to a four-year school, train others in vocational skills, bring countless adults new cultural