Any high school senior in doubt about whether to seek a higher education, says Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, faces an unflattering proposition: "The machine now has a high school education in the sense that it can do most jobs that a high school graduate can do, so machines will get the jobs because they work for less than a living wage. A person needs 14 years of education to compete with machines."
The trend toward more school after high school has this year reached the point where, for the first time, the span of education of the average U.S. jobholder tops twelve years, but automation and technology are rapidly making that level inadequate. At the same time, job competition is soaring swiftly: a million more 18-year-olds will enter the nation's labor market this year than last. Applications for college enrollment next fall are expected to leap by a dramatic 40% over 1964.
The convergence of these trends would strain the nation's system of higher education beyond capacity but for the remarkable growth of a uniquely American institution still so much in flux that educators cannot even agree on its name. Whether called the junior college, the two-year college or the community college, it is an institution that offers its students a three-track choice: preparation for transfer as a junior to a four-year college, general education for those who do not go on for more, and vocational training for such semiprofessional jobs as electronics technicians, engineering aides, laboratory assistants.
Taking the Heat Off. After years of trying to shake a too frequently justified image as only puffed-up high schools, the junior colleges have earned general acceptance as one of the most dynamic and useful assets of higher education. Last year 41 new two-year colleges, many boasting spectacular architecture and facilities (see following color pages), opened their doors, bringing the total to 719. Their enrollment has nearly doubled since 1950, is just over a million (1,043,000). One out of every five college students in the U.S. now goes to a junior college.
The pacesetter is California, which has 79 junior colleges and 152,000 full-time students. New York had 25 junior colleges in 1950, now has 69, placed so that 95% of all the people in the state are within 25 miles of one. Texas has 45, Pennsylvania 35, Florida 32. More new students enrolled in Illinois' 25 public junior colleges last year than in its public four-year colleges. When Florida's Miami-Dade Junior College opened in 1960, it had 1,300 students; today it has 14,000.
Obviously, that kind of growth takes much of the heat off the four-year colleges. California's master plan, for example, calls for its junior colleges to absorb 50,000 students by 1975 who otherwise would have qualified for entrance to the state university. But the statistics do not fully measure the true value of the junior colleges, which lies in their distinctive multiple functions.