Education: Four or Two?

It was all very well to talk, as many educators did, about doubling U.S. college enrollments by 1960. But was it really a good idea? Last week Harvard President James Bryant Conant said he had a better one: a lot more two-year colleges.

“Equality of opportunity,” said Conant, “is one of the cardinal principles of this country . . . Yet at the same time, no young man or woman should be encouraged or enticed into taking the kinds of advanced educational training which are going to lead to a frustrated economic life.”

With doubled enrollment, he thought, the four-year colleges and universities would turn out so many highly trained specialists that only a fraction of them would ever find jobs or be satisfied with the ones they did find. “I am afraid there has been traditionally in the United States a tendency to equate good education with long education. With any such equating, I want to violently disagree.” For a large majority of young Americans, a four-year college education was not only “needlessly expensive,” but “socially undesirable.”