ONLY a few years ago, most Americans heartily endorsed the nation's drive toward universal higher education. But now that 60% of U.S. high school graduates attend college, serious questions arise: What are colleges for? Who deserves admission? Or rejection? During the annual meeting of the American Council on Education in St. Louis last week, college presidents and administrators discussed a dramatic case in point: City University of New York and its new open-admissions policy. To some it seemed a triumph of democracy; to others, an omen that colleges may soon be overwhelmed with the "wrong" kind of students.
Tuition-free C.U.N.Y. has thrown open its doors this year to nearly any New York City high school graduate, regardless of his grades or the university's overburdened facilities. Even students who can barely read at ninth-grade level have been welcomed; C.U.N.Y. is determined to tutor them until they make it through a two-year community college or one of the city's topflight four-year institutions. Deluged with 35,000 freshmen, C.U.N.Y. is holding classes in rented store fronts and trailers; faculty members are taking turns at shared desks, and students are shunning jammed libraries to study in telephone booths.
Expansion and Exclusion. C.U.N.Y.'s switch from elitism to egalitarianism represents the academic world's most radical response so far to explosive changes in the nation's cities. In New York as elsewhere, rural blacks have flocked to the city; middle-class whites have increasingly moved to the suburbs. As a result, C.U.N.Y. and other urban universities confront rising pressure from poor youths, often members of minority groups, who yearn for the college degrees that they look upon as a ticket to U.S. affluence and status. "College is all kids talk about in high school these days," says Chris Vega, 18, a freshman at C.U.N.Y. "If you don't go to college, you just get any old job."
That desire for college is far from being fulfilled. Though U.S. campuses have almost tripled their enrollment since 1950, the headlong expansion has excluded vast numbers of college-age blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos and poor whites. Blacks still make up only 6.4% of U.S. undergraduates, and almost half of them attend all-black colleges. Money is obviously an obstacle: census studies show that a family with an income below $3,000 is five times less likely to include a child attending college than a family that earns $15,000 or more. But equally important is the appalling performance of many urban public schools, which have failed to prepare slum kids for college—or anything else that counts in U.S. society.