Enrollment Patterns in Postsecondary Education: 1961-1982.
Postsecondary education in America has shown enormous growth and change in the past forty years. The public sector has become dominant: public community colleges have emerged as a major factor in both number of institutions and number of students served, and the student participants in postsecondary education have increased in number and diversity. In the past twenty years, minorities, women, the economically disadvantaged, part-time attenders and adults have become well represented in the diverse student population. Significant policy shifts have produced federal programs designed to bring minority and lower socioeconomic class children into the mainstream of public education (Head Start and Title I), to assist them in preparing for college (Upward Bound and Talent Search), and to support and sustain them in college (Basic Educational Opportunity Grants and Trio Programs). The Vietnam conflict, the extension of the civil rights movement to ethnic groups other than blacks and to women, and a rapidly changing economy all may reasonably be assumed to have impacted the patterns of enrollment in postsecondary education of recent high school graduates. The demographics of higher education are changing. The data and projections coming from the Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Educational Statistics have made it clear that the cohorts of native born eighteen-to-twentyfour-year-olds are declining into the 1990s. The Carnegie Council [2], Glenny [5], Hodgkinson [7], and McConnell and Kaufman [8] among