Developing new approaches to planning should be a first order of business for urban-oriented institutions of higher education. Because many of them do not seem to understand their interdependency with the city and its people, they wind up with distorted planning and inappropriate use of resources. They also find themselves unable to articulate their institutional mission clearly or persuasively. These failures lead to others. The institutions are not only unable to produce the educational programs and services needed by the disadvantaged learner, they are also unable to acquire funding.

A good planning program should have at least five elements: (1) clear identification of disadvantaged groups that are either already served by the institution or need access to it; (2) systematic, on-going assessment of their educational needs; (3) examination of existing programs to determine their usefulness to students, and to reshape them where necessary; (4) recognition that the untraditional needs of the students require unconventional and creative responses; and (5) the gathering of information on local job-market realities. Moreover, the planning should be comprehensive—related to the total institutional context on the one hand and to the larger city context on the other.

Even with new kinds of planning, however, it is essential for the institutions, and for those who judge their performance, to recognize that they have limited resources. They cannot be all things to all people. In the first flush of open admissions and with the abundance of federal funds for higher education in the 1960s, urban-oriented colleges and universities seemed willing to serve everyone; they altered admissions standards and established ambitious new programs toward that end. Some of these programs have since been terminated because they lacked focus; others, which were working well, have been either cut out or cut back as federal funding has been reduced.