Education: General

Ever since the war's end, the nation's universities have been staggering under an ever-increasing load of students, realizing full well that the classroom boom is not only a temporary bull market brought on by the G.I. Bill, but evidence of a growing college population that has just been speeded up by it. Yet the problem of handling the great influx has only recently received careful study. President Truman's Commission on Higher Education, appointed in July, 1946, issued a report--the first of six--on December 15, in which it firmly faces the future of American colleges. Instead of wailing with the pessimists that schools ought to cut down to a timid pre-war level, the Commission strongly recommends that enrollment be doubled by 1960.

Such an ambitious program has been decried by some who maintain that there will later be a surplus of college-trained citizens for the sort of jobs that will satisfy them. But this argument is weakened by Commission figures that show the need for 1,000,000 teachers and 56,000 doctors within a decade. And the education itself need not be aimed at producing a horde of claimants for polished white-collar jobs.

To sustain the program, the Commission advocates the use of federal funds through scholarships and direct grants. It also proposes a substantial increase in adult educational facilities, and more local community colleges--many of them for two years' training--as part of state-managed organizations.

Based on definite educational needs and not on a vague democratic ideal, the report should gain wide support. Yet opposition to some of the Commission's proposals has already cropped up, and more will arise, if determined action follows the report. Federal aid to state institutions has long been a red flag to professional supporters of states' rights, especially in the South, which needs aid most. Also, four members of the Commission have dissented from the majority which condemned the paralyzing policy of racial segregation in southern colleges. Added to these stumbling-blocks of blind localism and prejudice, is the general inertia over education of the kind which has complacently allowed teachers' salaries to remain at a disgraceful level.

The Commission's report brings into full view the vast educational needs of the country; it serves as an honest beginning for a job of constructive effort that must strengthen and expand colleges before a half-hearted retreat into days of academic scarcity begins. Yet neither the problems the Commission attacks nor the proposals it offers are now. The past few years have only made the situation more precarious. The importance of the report lies in whether it will spur state and federal governments to use it as a guide for building up higher education to a point at least adequate for the new overwhelming demand.