In the 1950s and 1960s, the right to higher education became an assumption for an ever greater number of Americans. This book documents the changeover from an aristocratic and meritocratic view of higher education to an egalitarian view, more accurately reflecting the current status of American society.
Since the end of World War II, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of federal aid given to higher education. In the 1970s educators and federal policy makers have, however, come to realize that massive spending and an emphasis on widening access alone will not solve the basic problems of the quality and variety of educational opportunities that are available to the larger and more diverse group of people now seeking higher education. At the same time, there has been a switch in emphasis from the narrow concept of “higher education” (including colleges and universities only) to a broader concept of “postsecondary education” (including all modes of education beyond the high school level, such as community colleges, proprietary schools, in-house industrial programs, adult education courses).
Citing such areas of concern as the decline in enrollment of private institutions, the swelling of public university enrollments, the creating of multi-campus-system bureaucracies with their tendency to breed other bureaucracies and an assembly-line educational and social mobility, this book concludes that now is the time to reexamine our concepts of the structure and purpose of higher education so that we can more realistically design federal involvement.
The Task Force makes several recommendations, including more use of direct grants to students; the book concludes that “it is to the country's advantage to encourage a more open system of postsecondary education. We have favored openness and competition because we believe it will lead to both a more effective and a more efficient system.”
