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Even in the days before the U.S. Civil War, Vermont's farm-bred Congressman Justin Smith Morrill looked about him and saw an ill-trained nation speeding toward "decay and degradation." His bold proposal: launch land-grant colleges in every state to educate farmers, mechanics and "those at the bottom of the ladder who want to climb up." On a tense day in July 1862—as McClellan frittered away the Union Army at Malvern Hill—Lincoln signed the Morrill Act that gave 17.4 million acres to "people's colleges." So began the biggest effort in the history of man to hand higher education to anyone who wanted it.
Just as they revolutionized U.S. agriculture—and helped sow the farm surplus —state universities have reaped millions of students. In the 19303, Harvard's President James Bryant Conant predicted: "During the next century of academic history, university education in this Republic will be largely in the hands of the tax-supported institutions. As they fare, so fares the cultural and intellectual life of the American people."
One a Minute. How do they fare? As 3,567,000 students jammed U.S. campuses last week—with nearly twice as many due by 1970—the problem was numbers. From 4% in 1900, the proportion of college-age Americans who go to college has soared to 39% (five times as much as in Russia). In the past decade, three-quarters of the rise has gone to public campuses, which last year enrolled 58% of all U.S. college students. In 1970 they may enroll 65%, and in Western states already enroll up to 96%. This year state colleges and universities will confer 55% of all undergraduate degrees, 60% of masters' degrees and 54% of doctorates. The U.S. academic economy has clearly shifted to the public sector.
The increasingly higher cost of higher education is one explanation: tuition has jumped 165% at private colleges since 1950. According to one recent estimate, the cost of four years at an average private college in 1970 will be $11,684, on an Ivy League campus $15,216. By then the four-year cost at state universities is expected to be only $5,800.
What happens when the vast generation of war babies (now 15-19 years old) really hits the public campuses? Nobody has spent more hours seeking precise answers than Clark Kerr, president of the mammoth, seven-campus* University of California (47,895 students), the largest college complex in the U.S. Few states are growing faster than California: whether by birth or by migration, the population increases by one a minute. Each year California's growth matches the size of San Diego. Each day it needs one new school. Already it has the nation's biggest public school system (3,300,000). Already it has the nation's highest number of Collegians (234,000 fulltime), and 80% of them are on public campuses.