The Crisis of Student Quality in Higher Education

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, the academic community has been predicting a crisis based primarily on the irrefutable demographic situation. Due to the increasing birth rate between 1945 and 1960 and its subsequent decline from 1960 to 1975, the number of eighteen-yearolds available to enter college peaked in the 1970s and is likely to decline by about 25 percent between 1980 and 1996. It seems reasonable to ask, however, why problems would exist if the number of students age 18-24 enrolled in our nation's colleges and universities falls from 7 million plus in 1976 to perhaps 4 or 5 million in the late 1980s. First there is the issue of excess capacity. During the 1970s, American colleges and universities geared up in order to meet the constantly growing demands for higher education. New buildings were erected, thousands of new faculty members were hired, and new colleges were established. Thus, American colleges and universities now find themselves with vastly greater numbers of faculty than ever before-many of them tenured, and most of them twenty years or more from retirement. And these faculty will have far fewer students to teach in the rest of the 1980s and the early 1990s than they have to date.