The “Tidal Wave”Contained—Open Admissions

Abstract

Through the later fifties and sixties, the California plan was adopted, with modifications, in state after state. The four-year colleges and universities were protected by a rapidly expanding network of community colleges, over 360 of which were established between 1958 and 1968. The national increase in public two-year enrollments approached 300 percent for the decade of the 1960s, close to triple that for overall higher education enrollments. In New York, two-year enrollments increased from 6 percent of total public enrollments in 1960 to nearly 50 percent in 1970. The increases in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut were as dramatic, from 4 percent to 26 percent, 2 percent to 28 percent, and zero to 20 percent respectively. By 1976, more than one third of all college freshmen and nearly 50 percent of those in public institutions were enrolled in community colleges. Due in no small part to this rapid increase in the number and enrollment of the community colleges, higher education had come within reach of the 1947 President’s Commission recommendations: nearly one-half of the college-age population was attending some institution of higher education. As the 1973 Second Newman Report—commissioned and funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—proudly proclaimed, American higher education “by the middle 1960s began moving into . . . [an] egalitarian [period]. Increasingly the American public has assumed that everyone should have a chance at a college education.” Unfortunately for those offered that chance, the system, though opened at the bottom, remained as closed as ever on top. The new generation of students was not granted access to higher education in general but to particular institutions—the community colleges. And these colleges, though presented as transitional institutions to the four-year schools, were in fact designed to keep students away from the senior colleges. As Amitai Etzioni of Columbia University explained for the readers of the Wall Street Journal, “If we can no longer keep the floodgates closed at the admissions office, it at least seems wise to channel the general flow away from four-year colleges and toward two-year extensions of high school in the junior and community colleges.”