Education: Put Up–or Shut Up

It was a familiar enough warning, but seldom had it been sounded with greater urgency. The cost of accommodating the college population of the future will be so high, said President Lee A. DuBridge of Caltech last week, that the American people will either have to put up more money−or shut up about sending their kids to college.

By 1972, said DuBridge, the number of youngsters old enough to enter college will be up 75% to 4,000,000. “The fraction of these youngsters who wish to enter college is also rising, so that enrollments in the nation as a whole will surely be doubled . . . We must not only double the capacity in 15 years of a plant that we have taken 300 years to build, but we must pay for it in 1957 dollars, not 1857 dollars. It will take $1 billion a year for the next 15 years just to build the necessary buildings . . . And the annual operating costs will also rise from $3 billion a year today to $6 billion or possibly $8 billion by 1972.”

Where will the money come from? “Unfortunately,” said DuBridge, “the American people are not used to having the student and his parents pay directly the full cost of higher education. They are used to having it provided practically free at the state institutions and for from one to two-thirds of the actual cost at private institutions.” Private tuitions can be raised only so high, for most Americans will look at the new figures “and quickly decide to go to a state university or college instead−and let Mr. Taxpayer pay the bill. So [he] is going to get stuck anyway. He can take his choice whether voluntarily to direct part of his funds to private institutions or let the state tax away an even larger amount for expansion of state institutions . . .

“Now this is not a situation that the colleges themselves are responsible for. We college people may be doing the shouting−but it was the American people, as a whole, who decided to have more babies and who decided that they would see to it that those babies went to college. All we in the colleges are doing is saying to the American people that, while they are quite within their rights in having babies and in wanting them to go to college, they will have to pay the cost just as they pay for their automobiles and refrigerators−yes, on the installment plan, too, if that is necessary.”