Population Pressures and Academic Integrity: Should Education Be Used as a Substitute for Employment?
INCREASINGLY over the past seven years, college trustees, administrators, and faculty have been speculating on the effects the population explosion will have on their campuses. Some college presidents have been so bold as to predict that a complete and painless improvement in the quality of the student body will create a new image of their institutions. Optimistic trustees of several marginal colleges are convinced that they can build completely new campuses within two or three years. More conservative administrators of relatively obscure small colleges have limited their projections to paying off all outstanding obligations and raising teachers' salaries. The threat of the closing college door has struck dismay in the hearts of parents, but on many a campus it has led to rubbing of hands and dreams of plenty. It is time to stop dreaming. The closing college door is not going to be a cure-all for any college or university in the country. If anything, it may aggravate weaknesses on the very campuses that are looking forward to it with enthusiasm and enhance the image of the already strong institutions. Let us stop deceiving ourselves. Population explosion or not, our problems are still with us. In I930, there were more Americans of college age than in 1957. Yet in I957 there were more students in college. In I930, less than I2 per cent of students who were of college age attended college. In I957, approximately 32 per cent were obtaining some form of post-secondary school education. In I930, there were II,552,II5 young Americans in the high-school-age bracket of fifteen through nineteen. From this age group were drawn the freshman classes of the next four years. It was not until I958 that the fifteento nineteen-year-old population again reached the I930 level. In fact, there had been a half-million fewer teen-agers in this age bracket in I953 than in I930. In contrast to the birth rate during the depression, postwar births increased the ranks to more than I5,536,oco by I963.