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Backs Against the Wall
of higher education are funded at a level necessary to cover the costs.
There is another good reason for improving the data base. Urban-oriented institutions will have to reassess their established educational priorities if they are to improve their response to the inner-city poor and disadvantaged. Consideration should therefore be given to whether some of the funds now channeled into graduate or other high-cost programs in these institutions might not be spent more productively on compensatory and undergraduate programs. This suggestion will be criticized by those who staunchly defend graduate education or who think that their programs are more necessary than those of others. Nevertheless, comprehensive reassessment of graduate programs in urban-oriented institutions is urgently needed.
One final point should be made. Two-year and community colleges located in the cities bear an especially large responsibility for providing compensatory education for the poor and disadvantaged. Their problems are even more severe than those faced by four-year urban-oriented colleges and universities. Nevertheless, some studies indicate that federal, state, and local funding for two-year institutions is not being maintained at the same rate as that for four-year colleges and universities in the inner city. That disparity has obvious implications for instructional programs in the two-year colleges.
Student aid and loan programs designed to equalize educational opportunity actually restrict the participation of the poor in higher education. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reported in 1978, for example, that youth from low-income families are still only half as likely as middle- or upper-income youth to attend college. There are many reasons for the low participation rate, but before considering some of them, we have some general observations about the current predictions of declining enrollments in higher education during the 1980s and beyond.
The present debate about whether college and university enrollments can be expected to decline seems to us to divert attention from the real issue. There seems to be a general belief that if institutional resources can be maintained at present levels, the participation rate of various groups will some-how level out. But this line of thinking assumes that institutions will (or should) continue to behave much as they do now. It also tends to assume that the only people who matter are those customarily served