Education: Big Baby

Until two years ago, New York was the only state without a state university.* Then a commission headed by retired Industrialist Owen D. Young (General Electric) recommended that New York start one. The state legislature agreed, approved the blueprint of a $200 million general plan. The first step: administrative union for a group of 29 scattered schools of all sorts for which New York was already paying the bills, including teachers’ colleges, technical institutes, schools of forestry and industrial relations. To distinguish it from privately administered and financed New York University (N.Y.U.), the new omnibus outfit was named the State University of New York. With Stanford’s onetime Acting President Alvin C. Eurich at its head, S.U.N.Y. began operations last year.

Last week, the baby of U.S. state universities showed how big it had become. It took over a big booth at the Syracuse state fair for an exhibition of displays from its various campuses. New Yorkers found that their university extends from Niagara Falls to Brooklyn, that some bits & pieces of it are more than 100 years old, others barely four. In addition to its 29-school nucleus, S.U.N.Y. has absorbed two medical schools—the Long Island College of Medicine and the Syracuse University medical school—and two small postwar colleges, Champlain and Triple Cities. With last year’s enrollment of 34,000, S.U.N.Y. had already become the second largest state university† in the U.S.

All that is just the beginning. The Young commission report calls for a network of community colleges—some with two-year courses leading possibly to the degrees of A.A. (Associate in Arts) and A.A.S. (Associate in Applied Science)—for students who want college-level study at low tuitions and close to home. Under New York’s plan, half the capital cost must come from the local community. In addition, the community must furnish a third of the operating cost, with another third coming from tuition (probably about $150 a year). The rest of the money will come from the state.

S.U.N.Y.’s job, says President Eurich, is “to supplement, rather than compete with, private institutions.” By 1966, if all goes well, he expects S.U.N.Y. to have an enrollment of 100,000 in its community colleges alone.

*Rhode Island State College and Pennsylvania State College have the status though not the title of state universities. New York itself has had since 1784, a body called the “Regents of the University of the State of New York,” but its job is bossing the state education department in Albany. †The largest: California, 43,426.