American Higher Education Now and in the Future

Abstract

American higher education plunged from the heights of public regard and support during the late 1950s and the 1960s to a precarious position characterized by de creasing levels of financial support and public and political dis dain. This shift in fortune was in part produced because higher education had achieved so much that its leaders con vinced themselves and the larger society that the nation's col leges and universities had become the pivotal institution in society. Thus the future of higher education must be pon dered in the context of its present relatively low estate and by considering several imperatives. The future will really be decided by how those imperatives are treated. They are: to deploy resources more effectively; to accommodate new kinds of students; to maintain diversity; to invent ways to govern large collegiate systems; to plan simultaneously for three dec ades, each of which will be different with respect to the condi tions for higher education it will produce; to determine the nature of undergraduate education; and to reorder the priority assigned to graduate education. As these are resolved, a future can be epitomized thusly: sober realism, parsimony of claims, and more economical management of a large, complicated, and still influential social institution.