The Steady Seventies

Peter Schrag talks of the end of the bull market, James March discusses education as a declining industry, and college and university presidents across the country discuss a steady state in higher education and how institutions can adjust. Regardless of the rhetoric there has come to be widespread agreement that higher education and its problems and perplexities are of a substantially different order in the 1970s than they were during the explosively expansionist 1960s. While few intimately connected with colleges and universities need to be reminded that times are different, nonetheless a brief resume of several salient factors may be useful as a context within which institutional priorities and potentialities can be discussed. The enormous enrollment expansions which came about at the end of World War II seemingly are coming to an end and the projections made in the early 1960s of continuous expansion throughout the rest of the twentieth century are proving to be woefully unfounded. In 1952 there were some two and one-half million students enrolled in colleges and universities of all sorts. By 1972 there were approximately eight and one-half million students enrolled and earlier predictions anticipated that number rising to twelve million by 1980, and somewhere between seventeen and twenty million by the year 2000. It now appears that total enrollments in 1980 may be closer to ten and one-half million students, after which there very likely will come an absolute decline of a million, or even two million students by 1982 and '83. The most

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• The Financial Prospects for Higher Education in the 1980s

  Larry L Leslie•The Journal of Higher Education•1980

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