If a fourth-grader could gaze into a crystal ball and envision the college world he or she will enter in the year 2000, it would reveal a mixture of the surprising and the familiar. Dormitories would probably have the same kinds of sagging mattresses, desks and bookshelves that have furnished collegiate rooms for generations. School pennants and posters would likely be smeared across the walls. But there might be special TV consoles -- a few colleges have them now -- that could beam up taped lectures by any professor on campus or even let students monitor courses from other schools. Built-in computer terminals, similar to ones in place at Dartmouth, could tap into the card catalogs of half the college libraries in the country, call up encyclopedia articles or scan the daily papers. A glance at the quad outside would show groups of teens in whatever uniform eventually supplants T shirts and blue jeans, but also many older students taking courses to change careers, and even retired couples returning to campus to satisfy their curiosity about everything from art history to zoology.
There is, in fact, no need for a crystal ball to envision the university of the 21st century. Bit by logical bit, it is taking shape already on dozens of U.S. campuses as administrators begin to rethink their goals in light of a cost crunch that, recession or no, promises only to grow worse. From Kansas' Sterling College to Ohio's Youngstown State, from the huge State University of New York system (total enrollment: more than 369,000 on 23 campuses) to tiny Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage (639 students), officials are deciding not only how to do the same with less money but also how to do less with less.
Budget deficits have led to a sharp drop in both state and federal funding; public colleges and universities, which had previously relied on tuition and legislative grants to pay the bills, now compete aggressively with private institutions for corporate and foundation grants. Even heavily endowed Ivy League schools are deferring maintenance and debating whether to lop off entire academic branches. Yale, for example, is considering a plan that would close its linguistics department and merge three branches of engineering into one; Columbia is abandoning its highly regarded library-science program. Still, the Ivies are doing better than the vast California State university system. San Diego State University stirred student anger by dropping 662 of 5,000 class sections and not rehiring 550 part-time instructors last fall.
At the same time, critics of the academic establishment have raised sharp questions about whether U.S. colleges and universities, for all their reputed excellence, are giving good value for money, as tuitions rise faster than the inflation rate. One year at an elite private institution today costs $23,000; by the year 2000, the price could be as high as $40,000. Recent scandals, like the misallocation of federal research funds by Stanford and some other research-minded universities, have undermined academia's credibility with the public.