Trends Affecting Contemporary Educational Planning: The Program in Higher Education

Abstract

T HE major factor which affects educational planning today is growth. There are more persons to be educated, more things to learn about, and more ideas which stretch the horizons of human understanding. The rapidity of growth in each of these directions has spelled an urgency which pervades every facet of the educational system at all levels. Add the stress of an international struggle for survival, and the backdrop for contemporary educational planning falls into place. The trends in higher education which have significance for teachers and teacher education center around two sets of general problems: (i) problems of quantity-how to get enough institutions, teachers, classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and dollars to provide for the students who will attend college in the decades ahead; and (2) problems of qualityhow best to ensure that educational programs in the future will be of such rigor and strength as to stimulate the fullest possible development of human promise, and how to match the needs and requirements of an increasingly complex and changing society. These are the crucial problems in education. They go to the core of the educational program and to the fiber of the instructional staff. Within the past decade, two Presidential commissions have studied the needs of higher education and made recommendations for programs in support of those needs. Both commission reports have attested to the growing demand for widespread and diversified opportunities for education beyond the high school. In I949, a year in which college enrollments were still swollen by Second World War veterans and in which over two million students were attending college, the President's Commission boldly stated that the United States should set as a goal the enrollment of 4.6 million students by 1960. The Commission then recommended a large-scale federal scholarship program to enable the country to reach this goal, which was thought by some to be fantastic. In I957, less than ten years later, the President's Commission on Education beyond the High School calmly observed that the four-million mark would shortly be reached, and confidently predicted that at least six million students would be enrolled by I970. Startling scientific and technological developments, a rapidly shrink-