Higher Education and Market Forces.

• Author: IKENBERRY, STANLEY O.
• Position: Statistical Data Included

THE ENTIRE HISTORY of American higher education has been one of change. With the agricultural and industrial revolutions still in their infancy, higher education was transformed in the 1860s by the passage of the Morrill Act. A new national network of state and land-grant campuses was born. Science and technology found its way into the curriculum. College became possible, not just for a privileged few, but for the sons and daughters of farmers and factory workers, as well as countless others.

A second transformational event occurred at the end of World War II. With the passage of the GI Bill, the seeds for mass higher education in the U.S. were sown on a scale no nation had ever seen. World War II veterans packed up their bags and moved to campuses by the tens of thousands.

Today, nationwide, there are some 15,000,000 college students--60 times more than a century earlier and 10 times more than at the end of World War II. Beyond mere enrollment growth, higher education's research and public service roles exploded. The very mission and character of campuses and their relationship to society were altered.

Throughout most of this period of dramatic growth, the building blocks remained essentially the same: campuses; courses; classrooms and labs; faculty carrying multiple responsibilities for teaching, scholarship, and service; libraries; and pep rallies. The challenge was to build bigger and better while using familiar blueprints.

Looking ahead to a significantly changed environment and the new forces it brings, it is likely that at least some building blocks at some institutions will change. As in times past, wholly new institutional blueprints, with different cultures and processes, are emerging. What is not known is how, or how quickly, or with what consequences.

One way to think about the questions of "how" and "how quickly"--and to explore the consequences--is to take a look at the new environment in which institutions find themselves. In many ways, the forces are similar to those that are altering the business and corporate worlds, government, media and communications, politics, and the economy. The only curious outcome would be if colleges and universities were somehow left untouched amidst this whirlwind.

In 1998, Alan Greenspan spoke to higher education leaders in Washington. For academics to ask the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to speak was news, but for him to accept was even more surprising.

Greenspan talked about forces the educators all understood: the knowledge explosion, the technology revolution, and global markets. He spoke about the emergence of the conceptual economy, one in which the wealth of nations is defined less by natural resources and productive capacity than by intellectual strength, literacy, creativity, and the ingenuity of people. He noted that even as America's Gross National Product grew in recent years, its actual tonnage had declined.

These forces are not lost on the American public. The demand for high-quality education has accelerated. In 2000, I sat behind a one-way mirror and listened to people talk about college. There was so much they did not know, but in almost every...