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Building schools to accommodate everyone who can benefit from more education—and almost everyone figures that he can—creates a pressing need for overall planning in order to avoid conflicts about where campuses should be built and how the available money should be shared. Forty states now have coordinating boards that theoretically control all forms of higher education. The tidiest system of them all is still that of California, where former President Clark Kerr's master plan is continually reviewed by a coordinating council that includes representatives of the state's private colleges. The Kerr plan assigns clear functions to three levels of state institutions: the university (which takes the upper 12½% of high school graduates), the state colleges (the upper third), and the junior colleges (everyone else). Each level has its own governing board, such as the powerful university regents, but all yield to funding decisions of the state legislature and the Governor.
21st Century Preview. New York has chosen a different way. While California educators prefer the masterly simplicity of their own plan, Clark Kerr considers New York's program "the most important single development in higher education today." It is working so well, observes Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, that New York "is well on its way to overtaking California in the quality of its public higher education." Justifiably proud, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller boasts: "If you want to preview the American university of the 21st century, look at what is happening in higher education at S.U.N.Y. today."
What New York did, in 1948, was to lump every unit of public higher education in the state* into one vast multiversity. By the standards of the past, S.U.N.Y. hardly seems like a university at all. Instead of one central campus, it has 59: four major university centers (at Stony Brook, Buffalo, Binghamton and Albany), ten four-year colleges of arts and science, two medical centers, seven specialized colleges in such fields as forestry and labor relations, six two-year agricultural and technical schools, and 30 junior colleges.
"I can't think of a single possibility for education in this country," says Chancellor Gould, "that doesn't exist in the state university." Collectively, its campuses offer thousands of courses, ranging from the most abstruse branches of nuclear physics to secretarial training. The university also offers full-credit courses through a television network that reaches 80% of the state's population. On a given day, the Maritime College's 12,000-ton Empire State IV, a refitted troop transport, churns out toward the open sea; a lab class in horticulture at Cobleskill crossbreeds African violets. Future fashion designers cut patterns in Manhattan's garment district at the Fashion Institute of Technology, while future policemen seek an edge over criminals by studying at a criminology lab on Long Island.