Higher Education As a National Resource

A Retrospective on the Influence of the Carnegie Commission and Council on Higher Education

“Dr. Kerr, I realize it’s a little premature for you to announce any plans, but I would like to ask if you have any idea what you might like to do. Would you like to head another university?” Kerr: “Well, I really have to think about that. I’ve had a number of opportunities over these years; I’m not without opportunities at the moment. And I am going to want to give consideration to them. I don’t expect to be unemployed very long.”

-1967 press conference following the University of California Board of Regents’ decision to fire Clark Kerr as its president

It is one of the more famous chapters in the history of American higher education. In late 1966, Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California, beating a self-proclaimed “pragmatic liberal” who supported California’s pioneering public higher education system. Reagan’s campaign focused much of its rhetorical energy on the need to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” And when he was elected governor, one of his first actions was to successfully pressure the University of California’s (UC) Board of Regents to end Clark Kerr’s tenure as the university’s president.

After nearly nine years of leading the UC system in an era of rapid enrollment and program expansion, including a significant hand in guiding the state’s famed Master Plan for Higher Education and the opening of three new campuses, Kerr was one of the great stars of American higher education. He had proven an extremely adept leader of the nation’s largest public research university-and more. Kerr was a significant thinker on the role of universities and colleges in the modern world. His 1963 Godkin Lectures on what he termed the “multiversity” were a tour deforce-an acute observation on the condition, strengths, and weaknesses of America’s burgeoning universities.

By 1967, however, he also was the subject of vitriolic attacks both from the left and the right-from the left for being a part of the military-industrial complex, from the right for being an appeaser of radical protesters and communist sympathizers.

Despite pressure from a significant contingent of regents that Kerr resign-to appease the new governor and for some regents, to settle old scores with Kerr-he refused. On January 20, 1967, the board voted 14 to 8 to terminate Kerr’s presidency, essentially ending his 38-year affiliation with the university, first as an economics graduate student, then as a faculty member, then as chancellor at Berkeley (1952-1958), and finally as university president (1958-1967). Kerr retained a faculty position at Berkeley, but that seemed small comfort.

In a press conference only hours after the regents’ vote, Kerr was gracious but also pointed. “I do not believe in the principle that because there is a new governor there needs to be a new president of the university,” he stated. Later he famously quipped, “I leave the university as I entered it, fired with enthusiasm.”

Kerr had not given much thought to his fate after the regents’ vote. But others had. The evening of his dismissal as president, Kerr received a number of phone calls offering condolences, encouragement, and jobs. The most important came from Alan Pifer, the president of the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT). Pifer asked Kerr to help establish and direct what became the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, which would promote research and reflection on higher education and its role in society.

THE COMMISSION AND THE COUNCIL

Pifer had become president of the Carnegie Corporation and the CFAT in 1965 after serving as the corporation’s vice president. He had succeeded John W. Gardner, who had accepted a position as President Johnson’s head of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). Pifer, Gardner, and the board of the Corporation had considered closing down the Foundation, since, in Pifer’s view, it had not done much since the early 1950s. The idea of Kerr’s leading an expansive study of higher education justified the CFAT’s continuation. The commission (1967 to 1973) and then its successor, the Carnegie Council on Higher Education (1973-1979) became the sole activity of the Foundation between 1967 and 1979.

The commission was to be a national effort, unprecedented in its scope and in the freedom of its director-Kerr-to guide its research. Pifer promised substantial funding for five years or more, with no need to find other sources of support. And Kerr would be allowed to direct the effort from Berkeley, establish an office near the campus, hire staff, and draw scholars and practitioners into the commission’s fold. Pifer would serve as its chairman.

Kerr worked with Pifer and with Alden Dunham and David Robinson, both at the Carnegie Corporation, to shape the commission’s agenda. They planned to investigate and provide recommendations on the most vital issues facing American higher education in the latter part of the 20th century. In doing so, the commission would not speak for the higher education community, “but rather about higher education and its needs and contributions.”

Kerr and his compatriots set out a research agenda that eventually produced 37 policy reports and 137 sponsored research and technical reports. Most of the major reports were not published until 1970, almost three years after the establishment of the commission, reflecting the deliberate process and careful research devoted to each. A flurry of reports came out in the very early 1970s, reflecting Kerr’s and the commission’s goal of informing and influencing the 1972 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Allen Pifer had initially offered the commission a five- to six- year lifespan, which turned into seven. At the end of that period, much had changed. The enthusiasm for national solutions to the problems of the Great Society had vanished, funding for education had dissipated, and enrollment projections indicated a long-term flattening of demand for higher education.

When the commission’s lifespan under the original agreement with Pifer ended, Kerr requested to maintain the momentum in a new form- as the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. He wanted to sponsor a new round of studies on the “steady state” of American higher education and follow up on many of the key reports of the commission. The council took form in 1973 and lasted until 1979, when Kerr decided that he would “retire.” At that time, Pifer also retired as president of the Carnegie Corporation and the CFAT. Ernest Boyer then became the CFAT’s-although not the corporation’s- new president. Boyer chose not to continue the council, instead seeking to make his own mark on American education.

ASSESSING INFLUENCE

Higher education as a field of study has grown substantially since the work of Kerr’s commission and council. But since that time, there has been no similarly concerted and systematic effort to address the operation, funding, and role of America’s universities and colleges. Many of the Carnegie reports and studies remain salient, and they offer contemporary policymakers and observers of American higher education a benchmark on our progress and remarkably fresh solutions to the problems we face today.

The sheer volume and quality of the commission’s and council’s sponsored studies and published material was astonishing. One critical factor in the productivity of the commission and the council was their financial independence. In total, the Carnegie Corporation provided approximately $1.8 million for the commission- a large sum in that era. The Ford Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund also supported a number of commission and council projects in the area of education for health-related professions, and the American Council on Education cooperated in a collection of surveys intended to gauge institutional change.

A second factor that accounts for the commission’s and the council’s productivity was Kerr’s recruitment of a new generation of higher education leaders and practitioners who had the opportunity- indeed the mandate-to think creatively. Kerr welcomed old and new friends to the 19-member commission, including current and former university and college presidents Nathan M. Pusey (Harvard), Eric Ashby (Cambridge University), William Friday (North Carolina), Katherine McBride (Bryn Mawr), David Henry (University of Illinois) and Theodore M. Hesburgh (Notre Dame), as well as academics such as Carl Kaysen (Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton) and David Riesman (Harvard).

In a number of instances, the influence of the commission, the council, and their bevy of affiliated scholars was substantial; in other areas, it is hard to find any direct outcomes. Yet the sheer existence and breadth of the work by Kerr and his many colleagues produced beneficial effects even when it didn’t change policy and practice.

The commission and council created a wealth of detailed knowledge and adventuresome ideas that altered and accelerated the way Americans think about higher education. The breadth of the commission’s and council’s work helped to build a higher education community more habituated to self-reflection and discourse. Only a few major schol\arly journals existed prior to the work of the commission, including The Journal of Higher Education, established in 1930. By the 1970s, however, new organizations and publications had emerged. The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) was established in 1969 and in 1984 began to edit Change. The Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) broke off from AAHE in 1976 and subsequently published The Review of Higher Education.

At the end of the commission’s six-year lifespan, and after 21 special reports and 80 sponsored studies had been published by McGraw-Hill and then Jossey-Bass, Kerr and his colleagues faced criticism -a natural outcome for such an expansive effort to evaluate and reshape American higher education. Kerr and the various incarnations of his board were not timid, and they took risks in making controversial recommendations in a world of shrinking higher education resources and, arguably, a hardening within the academy against new experiments and notions of reform.

Yet many within the higher education community understood the great value and unsurpassed breadth of the effort, even if they disagreed with many of the commission’s recommendations. Harold Enarson wrote in The Journal of Higher Education in 1973 that in all the Carnegie reports and studies, “the commission is pragmatic to the core. Start with the system, the changing needs of our time, the visible problems that plague us, and then propose steps and solutions at the edge of the possible.”

AN AMBITIOUS RESEARCH AGENDA

Fundamental to the world-view of Kerr, Pifer, and their colleagues was the belief that mass higher education and the expansion of America’s vast public and private mix of colleges and universities was vital to the nation’s social and economic future. They also professed that an increased federal role was essential for adequately supporting the nation’s higher education venture.

This led to studies on a variety of related issues, including the financing of higher education and the intertwined issues of equity, financial aid, and affordability. Their recommendations in this area often pitted Kerr and his colleagues against powerful pohtical and institutional interests.

Paying for higher education. The first sponsored studies were brilliant: they included Howard R. Bowen’s The Finance of Higher Education and The Economics of Major Private Universities by William G. Bowen (no relation), both published in 1968. Howard Bowen, an economist, made a famous observation in his study that came to be known as the “revenue theory of costs”: In their search for quality and excellence, he noted, colleges and universities will spend every dollar they get-so higher education will always cost as much as institutions can raise. At the same time, Earl Cheit authored a study that pointed to the precarious fiscal position of many colleges and universities, stating that American higher education was entering a “new depression,” characterized by sustained decreases in revenue.

Despite Cheit’s predictions, the flow of federal funds to states and institutions for higher education grew steadily in the eight years after Sputnik-funds to support scholarships, basic research, and, for a period, capital construction. How those funds were dispersed created disgruntlement, however. Some Washington lawmakers wanted to allocate a portion of or all federal research and financial aid funds on a proportional basis to states or directly to institutions based on their enrollment size or other similar calculations. Instead, specific states and institutions, usually the privates and elite public institutions, gained the most resources from the federal coffers.

The federal financial-aid pattern initiated under the GI Bill had been to enable students to make their own choices by giving them, and not institutions, the bulk of federal grants and loans. In its first report offering formal recommendations, Quality and Equality: New Levels of Federal Responsibility for Higher Education (1968; revised and expanded in 1970), the Carnegie Commission argued fervently against block funding and maintained that federal financing by and large needed to take the form of grants and loans given directly to needy students. One of the “most urgent national priorities,” argued Kerr and his compatriots, “is the removal of financial barriers for youth who enroll in our diverse colleges and universities, whether in academic or occupational programs.”

Moving toward block funding, Kerr believed, would pit states and institutions against each other, making federal funding of financial aid an overtly political process steeped in special-interest advocacy. Funding students and not institutions avoided or mitigated this possibility while empowering students to choose whichever institution best met their needs. These Carnegie recommendations eventually led to the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) and the State Student Incentive Grants (SSIG), which later became Pell Grants and Perkins Loans.

While proposing that the federal government concentrate most of its financial aid funding on need-based grants, the commission also advocated supplementary federal “matching grants” to institutions to “encourage commitment” of funds from private, state, and local government sources. If a student with a federal educational opportunity grant went to a particular institution, for example, the commission recommended that the institution gain an additional 10 percent of the total sum of the grant to use at its discretion for needy students.

Keeping college affordable also drove the commission’s 1971 report The Open Door Colleges, which focused on the need for expanded federal, state, and local support of the inexpensive community colleges, as well as the colleges’ need for curricular improvements, better governance, and higher standards for faculty. Many states subsequently gave greater attention to the pivotal role of these local colleges.

These were just some of the many proposals put forth by the commission to leverage resources for needy students and to expand access. But few found sufficient support in Washington to blossom into specific policies at that time. For example, the 1970 supplementary report to Quality and Equality proposed a National Student Loan Bank as a federally chartered, nonprofit private corporation financed by the sale of governmentguaranteed securities to replace the indirect loan system in which private banks acted as the intermediary-essentially skimming off profits while the federal government assumed all the risks of potential defaults. Savings under the direct loan program would allow for expanding eligibility for such loans and establishing more lenient repayment schedules.

Private financial institutions vehemently opposed the proposal, and it went nowhere. Undaunted, a 1979 Carnegie Council report, Next Steps for the 1980s in Student Financial Aid, again suggested a nonprofit direct-loan agency that would “replace the existing inadequate, costly, and inequitable loan programs by a National Student Bank.” The report also asked the federal government to avoid “tuition tax credits, which are regressive and self-defeating.”

Ten years later, the Bush administration finally established a “direct loan” program on an experimental basis. But it was President Clinton who championed the scheme (while ignoring the council’s recommendation against tuition tax credits). His administration attempted to rebut arguments by banks and supporters on Capitol Hill that a government-chartered agency could not be as efficient as the private sector.

Today, powerful political opposition has failed to kill the program. But direct loans represent only about one-fourth of all federally subsidized loans, even as evidence mounts that a complete move to direct loans could save billions of dollars that could be reinvested in financial aid programs. Using OMB numbers, a recent study by Student Loan Watch calculates that government-guaranteed loans cost taxpayers 12 cents, while direct loans cost less than one cent for every federal dollar spent.

Despite its preference that the federal government’s support of higher education come largely in the form of financial aid, the Carnegie Foundation affirmed the historical practice of direct state funding of public institutions. But the 1973 report Higher Education: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Who Should Pay? claimed that not only was the era of high levels of state subsidization for public higher education coming to an end, the traditional mode of low or no tuition was inequitable and insufficient.

Taxpayers across all income segments supported the education of, in general, the children of the privileged. “A low tuition policy by itself,” concluded the study, “tends to channel more subsidies to higher-income groups.” The commission recommended that while fees for the first two years at community colleges should be extremely low or non-existent, at four-year public institutions they should be increased.

At the time, undergraduate students and their families paid for less than a quarter of a student’s education in the four-year public sector; in the private sector, they paid approximately 62 percent of the costs. Within public institutions, the commission argued that the student and family contribution should increase to a third, state governments should subsidize another third, and the federal government should fund the remaining share-figures derived not by a careful analysis but in large part by what might be politically acceptable.

Why burden students and their families with greater cost sharing? One reason was equity. Another reason was the need to raise revenue. Public higher education faced a projected decline in state government investment and only limited additional federal subsidies (although the commission and council consistently argued for a larger federal contribution). Moreover, at that time \there was no major expectation of substantial increases in endowment funds for the operational costs of publics. The key was to target student aid policy toward low-income and, to a lesser degree, middle-income families.

In the early 1970s, the public sector enrolled seven of every 10 students. That share was projected to grow-and it did. The commission proposed that a modest tuition/high financial aid model needed to replace the low tuition/low financial aid model, such as the one that had characterized the California Master Plan, for the long-term health of four-year public institutions. The higher price would help defray the operational costs of institutions and help fund more robust financial aid program. Increasing tuition would thus rebalance who paid, help maintain quality and institutional capacity, and theoretically help expand access for needy groups. The commission recommended that the increase in tuition in public institutions be “modest and gradual.” It also proposed that states and the federal government provide greater subsidies to private institutions to help slow and possibly contain fee increases.

In an age dominated by projections of enrollment declines and a devotion to the long-honored concept that lower tuition rates translated into improved access for disadvantaged groups, the Carnegie model had little political traction. Public colleges and universities generally saw it as an excuse for state governments to reduce their subsidization of higher education in favor of increasing tuition.

Yet the commission’s work has remarkable currency today. Over the past couple of decades, public institutions have experienced long- term declines in public investment-as a percentage of state budgets and in real dollars per student for many major public universities. In many states the publics delayed raising fees but finally did so in earnest in the early 1990s-the consequence of the severe national recession and state budget shortfalls, tax cuts, and structural deficits. But tuition increases have created substantial political problems for public institutions, fee increases tend to come in brief spurts, and often they do not make up for long-term declines in state funding.

Meanwhile privates have been able to raise their tuition rates substantially, possibly over-pricing their product but funneling the largess into financial aid and into improving their undergraduate programs and services. As operating budgets rose faster in the elite privates than they did in the elite publics, arguably one consequence is that the quality of undergraduate programs at flagship public institutions has declined relative to their private peers.

Today, students and their families pay approximately one quarter of the cost of their education at public four-year institutions, on average and not counting financial aid-depending on the type of institution, how you count, and noting that costs have risen substantially above the rate of inflation, about what it was when Carnegie did its analysis.

In addressing the funding dilemma, the commission did not ignore the institutional responsibility to keep costs down. One way in which institutions could increase what later came to be called their “learning productivity” related to time-to-degree. In the 1970 report Less Time, More Options, the commission advocated a three- year bachelor’s degree and a PhD program shortened by a year or two- depending on the field. Similarly, the commission advocated shortening the program and residency period for health professionals. However, since then degree time has lengthened, especially in graduate education.

The 1972 report The More Effective Use of Resources also claimed that colleges and universities should “greatly reduce” the number of degrees offered, maintaining that their proliferation not only was costly but eroded the coherence of undergraduate education, a negative aspect of the multiversity. This recommendation was destined to be ignored. Reflecting the ever-expanding nature of academic research, growing specialization, and the internal politics of institutions, the number of degree programs continues to grow. Another familiar proposed solution was year-round operation. In the intervening decades, many institutions have moved to something like full-year operation, depending on how one defines it, but most campus facilities have yet to be used to their full capacity.

Curriculum reform. Curriculum reform was another major emphasis of the commission, fostered by the realization that while America hosted a great array of academically strong institutions, it also included a group of relatively weak colleges and universities. There was also indirect evidence that the quality of undergraduate education had suffered as public colleges and universities rapidly expanded during the 1960s. Student-to-faculty ratios, for example, had climbed-particularly within the large public universities-and there appeared to be greater disparities in the resources available to the different disciplines.

How to inspire and invigorate the undergraduate experience? One route was to offer ideas on curricular reform, including “stop-out” programs for life-long learning. Money was another answer. With the hope of a growing, although circumscribed, federal role, one of the commission’s first recommendations in the arena of curriculum reform was a National Foundation for the Development of Higher Education to fund institutional programs that established “new directions in curricula” while strengthening “essential areas that have fallen behind or never been adequately developed.”

Under the aegis of the proposed National Foundation, the commission argued, an annual federal allocation of $200 million could help improve undergraduate education, support university and college outreach efforts to improve the curricula of local schools, help fund regional arts centers operated by consortia of postsecondary institutions, and integrate service-learning into academic programs.

The commission, with remarkable prescience, also thought the proposed foundation could investigate the “effective use of modern technology” (video and cable TV broadcasts and limited forms of computer-based instruction in the era before the PC) for teaching. A report authored by Eric Ashby and Ralph Besse, The Fourth Revolution: Instructional Technology in Higher Education, stated that universities and colleges “now face the first great technological revolution in five centuries in the potential impact of the new electronics.” They estimated that by the year 2000, perhaps 10-to-20 percent of instruction “may be carried on through informational technology.” They doubted that this would happen by way of a paradigm shift. Rather, they thought change would come slowly, “costing more money” and “adding [to] rather than replacing older approaches.”

A federally funded foundation with sizable resources, of course, never came about. The 1972 reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act did establish the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), but it became a unit of the U.S. Office of Education. While for several decades it had a remarkable effect on higher education, given its modest funding, it is now increasingly dedicated to the distribution of federal earmarks.

The commission and the council also sought to improve the curricula and degree production of professional programs, especially those related to health Margaret S. Gordon provided much of the work that led the commission to recommend, in Higher Education and the Nation’s Health (1970), a more active federal role in expanding the capacity of medical schools, providing grants to residents and interns, and supporting community-based health programs organized by universities. The work of the commission in this area influenced the subsequent passage of the Health Manpower Act of 1971, intended to support a 50-percent increase in medical school students.

The classification of colleges and universities. To help with the collection of data on higher education enrollments, budgets, and degrees, in 1968 the federal government established the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS, which later became IPEDS). But HEGIS had significant limitations. A that time, most efforts at categorizing col leges and universities simply noted their status as a public or private institutions, the degrees they offered (two-year, four-year, master’s, etc.), and whether they were accredited. But lumping together a broad range of institutions hindered analysis. Creating a more nuanced classification framework, thought Kerr and his associates, would be an important ste in more fully understanding the world of American higher education.

The development of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions was one of the Carnegie Commission’s most influen tial projects. After years of study and debate, in 1973 the Carnegie Classification was unveiled, and it continues to influence the way we view American higher education. (For a thorough discus sion of the Carnegie Classification, see Alex McCormick’s and Chunmei Zhao’s article in this issue.)

Again, the Commission faced formidable opposition. Many institutions disliked being categorized-particularly those with ambitions to expand their degree programs or those that feared sue! classification might jeopardize their state and federal funding.

Nearly four decades later, the Carnegie Classification (like the Carnegie unit) remains a valuable, yet often-criticized, tool. A recent critique called it “a great leap forward in describing the diversity of higher education in the United States,” while observing that its “wide acceptance may be its greatest liability, as its present uses have far exceeded its original purpose.” As some feared, it grew from a way to describe American higher education into a powerful influence on how states approached the governance and financialsupport of public institutions.

And in an age increasingly fascinated with rankings of any type, the public and institutions themselves appeared to view it as a hierarchical prestige and quality scheme. In his recent volume on the history of American higher education, John Thelin observes that the classification “set off a competitive rush by institutions to meet the operational criteria” to move up the ladder that it seemed to have created. For this and other reasons, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is now substantially revising the classification system’s categories and methodology.

Funding and leadership. To implement all of its proposals, the Carnegie Commission estimated that the federal government would need to invest, over an eight-year period, an additional $12.6 billion above its existing commitments for financial aid and other programs. And it proposed that the federal government reorganize itself to more adroitly influence American higher education.

Beginning in the 1930s, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had argued for a cabinet-level position devoted to education. In 1972, the commission revived the idea, since “higher education is today a basic national resource.” Later, a revised proposal advocated an “undersecretary or secretary of Education, Research, and Advanced Studies” within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). The Carter administration did reorganize HEW, elevating the commissioner of education to a cabinet post. Yet the appointment has, thus far, had only a minor influence on federal policy related to higher education.

KERR’S FINAL REFLECTIONS

The work of Kerr and his many colleagues generated a new wave of analysis and reflection on the growing role of higher education in society. Kerr believed that colleges and universities, the states, and the federal government all needed to work together to continue America’s great adventure as the world’s first mass higher education system. But it was clearly the federal government for which Kerr and his colleagues saw a special and new role.

In the halls of government and on campuses, the work of the commission and council contributed to the ongoing discussion of the purposes of higher education. “Their reports galvanized discussions on campuses across the country,” notes Scott Wren, who authored several self-assessments by the commission and council. “They were read by Presidents and Chancellors (even students and faculty) and got them to re-examine and discuss a broad range of issues.”

In its final 1979 report, Three Thousand Futures, the Carnegie Council noted that many of its most dismal predictions had not come to pass. Total enrollment between 1970 and 1979 had increased 24.3 percent rather than declining as predicted. Earl Cheit’s “new depression” had not arrived. State governments had actually increased their share of institutional expenditures for public colleges and universities from 36.6 percent to 41.6 percent. And tuition levels had not increased but had declined as a percentage of personal income, from 10.5 percent to 9.6 percent for those attending public institutions and from 50.3 percent to 44.5 percent at privates. American higher education, the report noted, was “generally in good shape.” Surveys sponsored by the council indicated that confidence in higher education had grown.

So Kerr, the primary author of the final report, was generally optimistic. However, a number of worries remained. The federal contribution to higher education (not including research) had not grown as urged by the commission and council; instead it had dropped 23 percent. The rising operational costs of higher education, a weakening economy, hyper-inflation sparked by the OPEC oil crisis, the specter of declining state investment in higher education, and the political problems of increasing tuition fees in public institutions all seemed to indicate that the financial analysis and models offered by the Carnegie Commission and Council remained relevant.

The general rigidity of colleges and universities and the corresponding lack of curricular innovation also worried Kerr. Government mandates and controls, along with “aging faculties, the emergence of veto groups, and the spread of collective bargaining” appeared to him as significant barriers to innovation.

Three Thousand Futures argued that America’s vast and highly differentiated network of public and private institutions (the 3,125 institutions in existence by 1979) was one of America’s greatest strengths. The nation needed to preserve that diversity and avoid convergence or decline.

HIGHER EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL RESOURCE REVISITED

At the time of the commission’s and council’s great work, American higher education’s participation rates, affordability, and degree attainment-as well as the vast size and quality of its research enterprise-were the envy of the world. Europe and many other countries looked to higher education in the United States as a model for adoption on their own cultural and political terms.

Things have changed. America is still generally unconcerned about the competition in what is now a global economy, and our world- class research infrastructure remains healthy. But in some important ways, there are growing problems.

American participation rates in tertiary education have leveled off and show indications of declining. Among younger students, many EU countries have approached, and in a few cases exceeded, the participation rates found in the United States. Among OECD members, America now ranks only 13th in the percentage of the population that enters postsecondary education and then completes a bachelor’s degree or enters a postgraduate program. One reason among many: the United States is the only OECD country with a significant long-term drop in secondary graduation rates. Another reason: increased fees at public universities, while arguably moderate, have not been accompanied by an adequate growth in national and state financial- aid programs or in significant increases in institutional productivity. It is not that America’s higher education system is not still relatively vibrant, but the trajectory is worrisome.

Many of the Carnegie Commission’s dire predictions did not come true-until the 1990s. We now have clearly significant problems with access and financing-particularly among the publics, which enroll and will continue to enroll the vast majority of students. And there is no one calling attention to the problems we face with the authority Kerr mustered in the 1970s. In the United States, these are second- or third-tier national policy issues. In many EU countries-with their conceited efforts to, in the words of the Bologna Agreement, “increase the international competitiveness of a European system of higher education”-they are first-tier issues.

In this context, the leadership of Clark Kerr and the commission and council he headed seem both prophetic and badly needed.

Arguably, the federal government has a greater role to play in supporting American higher education than ever before. Although such a suggestion cuts against the current political ethos of free markets and less government and raises the danger of another stifling round of bureaucracy, one might reconsider how a national strategy could strengthen American higher education.

Kerr and his associates imagined ways in which federal support might enhance access and quality while also empowering students and institutions. Herein lies a formula well worth revisiting.

SAMPLE LISTING OF CARNEGIE COMMISSION AND COUNCIL REPORTS

* Quality and Equality: New Levels of Federal Responsibility for Higher Education, 1968, Revised Recommendations, 1970

* A Chance to Learn: An Action Agenda for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, 1970

* The Open-Door Colleges: Policies for Community Colleges, 1971

* Higher Education and the Nation’s Health: Policies for Medical and Dental Education, 1971

* Less Time, More Options: Education Beyond the High School, 1970

* The Capitol and the Campus: State Responsibilities for Postsecondary Education, 1971

* Institutional Aid: Federal Support to Colleges and Universities, 1972

* The More Effective Use of Resources: An Imperative for Higher Education, 1972

* The Purposes and Performance of Higher Education in the United States: Approaching the Year 2000, 1973

* Higher Education: Who Pays ? Who Benefits ? Who Should Pay? 1973

* The Federal Role in Postsecondary Education: Unfinished Business, 1975-1980, 1975

* More than Survival: Prospects for Higher Education in Period of Uncertainty, 1975

* Making Affirmative Action Work in Higher Education: An Analysis of Institutional and Federal Policies with Recommendations, 1975

* Selective Admission in Higher Education, 1977

* Federal Reorganization: Education and Scholarship, 1977

* Next Steps for the 1980s in Student Financial Aid: A Fourth Alternative, 1979

* Three Thousand Futures: The Next Twenty Years for Higher Education, 1980

SAMPLE LISTING OF STUDIES SPONSORED BY THE CARNEGIE COMMISSION AND COUNCIL

* Howard R. Bowen, The Finance of Higher Education, 1968

* William G. Bowen, The Economics of Major Private Universities, 1968

* E. Alden Dunham, A Profile of State Colleges and Regional Universities, 1969

* Lewis B. Mayhew, Graduate and Professional Education, 1980: A Survey of Institutional Plans, 1970

* Eric Ashby, Any Person, Any Study: An Essay on American Higher Education, 1971

* Eugene C. Lee and Frank M. Bowen, The Multicampus University: A Study of Academic Governance, 1971

* Symour E. Harris, A Statistical Portrait of Higher Education, 1972

* Alexander W. Astin and Calvin B.T. Lee, The Invisible Colleges: A Profile of Small, Private Colleges with Limited Resources, 1972

* James A. Perkins, The University as an Organization, 1973

* Margaret S. Gordon (ed), Higher Education and the Labor Market, 1974

* S.M. Lipset and David Riesman, Education andPolitics at Harvard, 1975

* Martin Trow et al, Teachers and Students: Aspects of American Higher Education, 1975

* Lyman Glenny et al, Presidents Confront Reality: From Edifice Complex to University Without Walls, 1976

* Howard R. Bowen, Investment in Learning: The Individual and Social Value of American Higher Education, 1977

* Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, 1977

* Charlotte V. Kuh, Market Conditions and Tenure for Ph.D.s in U.S. Higher Education, 1978

* Arthur Levine, When Dreams and Heroes Died: A Portrait of Today’s College Student, 1980

* Three Thousand Futures: The Next Twenty Years for Higher Education, Carnegie Council, 1980

One of the “most urgent national priorities,” argued Kerr and his compatriots, “is the removal of financial barriers for youth who enroll in our diverse colleges and universities.”

One way in which institutions could increase what later came to be called their “learning productivity” related to time-to-degree.

Among OECD members, America ranks 13th in the percentage of the population that enters postsecondary education and then completes a bachelor’s degree or postgraduate program.

John Aubrey Douglass is a senior research fellow of public policy and higher education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The California Idea and American Higher Education and the forthcoming The Social Contract of Public Universities.

Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Sep/Oct 2005