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237  Higher Education
     March 15, 1972

     The conflict between House and Senate over busing is surely 
dominating the conference committee that is now reviewing the Higher 
Education bill.  That controversy may unhappily submerge some of the
crucial issues that the legislation was originally intended to address.
Although merely an authorization for new federal programs that might
never be funded, the bill would set major policies bound to affect the
future of all higher education in this country.  This is the vital
frontier of every modern society; and there can be no doubt that it
will be reshaped by federal policies.  The university system may
remain a mosaic of private, local, and state-supported institutions.
However they are manifestly unable to meet their responsibilities
without substantial funding from the federal budget.  The question is
how to sustain the quality and diversity of role of these institutions
against the pressures for uniformity and centralized control that most
people foresee in large federal programs.

     Many conflicting demands are placed on the schools and the system
design of new legislation.  The great private universities cannot be
sacrificed; but they must be made more accessible to students who can-
not afford the ever-rising cost of tuition.  Poor states need subsidies;
but the states that now support university systems of high quality
(like California and the mid West) must not simply shift their 
tax burdens. Institutions should not be ridden with bureaucratic 
regulations from afar; but they must be ultimately responsible to the 
taxpayers and also to the students themselves.  The educational product
must be "manufactured" with responsible efficiency; but the very
expression is at odds with the scholarship that we expect in a learned
faculty.  Some will decry what they believe to be professors' preference
for the laboratory over the classroom but will demand admission
precisely to the schools that are the most productive in research.

     Even if the authorizations were matched by full funding -- which
is hardly to be believed for the near future -- both the Senate and
the House bill would barely begin to take on the costs of higher 
education as a federal responsibility. Reimbursement to the institutions
would be limited to about $200 per student, according to a sliding scale
offers somewhat more for smaller schools. Student aid would be limited
limited to about $1500 for most needy students, much less or none for 
those whose parents' income is judged too high to justify a subsidy. 
These levels of funding, if they were achieved, are important; but the
real significance of the bills is in the precedent they set for the 
future style of federal support.

     At first sight the two bills look rather similar. The Senate
version, sponsored by Senator Claiborne Pell would establish a presum-
ably broader range of student aid benefits called "Basic Educational 
Opportunity Grants" (BEOGs) keyed to the family income. The institutions
could get cost-of-education benefits in proportion to the number
of BEOGs awarded to their students.  On the House side, Congresswomen
Edith Green's bill, would award EOG's mainly by allotment to the
states; however, the institutions would receive a flat subsidy based
on their total student enrollment subject to a complicated formula that
pays more for the first few hundred students, for the upper classes,
and for participation in other federally supported education programs.

     Common to both bills is the implied role given to students gene-
rally , or to BEOG-qualifying students in particular, to allocate
federal support to the schools they choose by enrolling therein.  In
principle this can be thought of as a corrective to the market 
influence now enjoyed by the more affluent consumers who pay high 
tuition fees for educational product and by alumni and other 
philanthropic supporters of the private institutions.  Both formulas 
might reduce the pressure on legislatures to sustain support for the 
state schools.  It is argued that the Pell bill is less likely to do 
this by keying the support in somewhat less predictable fashion to 
BEOG-grantees.  Neither bill allows for any quality factor, nor any 
recognition that the cost of education should vary among schools with  
different aspirations and quality of output.  This may not be the time  
to expect Congress to put first priority on an elitist principle.  Some
educators are, however, concerned whether these steps taken today may 
foreclose a wider range of patterns of support at some future time when
the most urgent problems of egalitarian access to some standard of 
higher education have been solved.

     From this perspective, some advantages may be seen in the Pell
bill.  Its benefits are more sharply targeted on the high-priority
lower-income students.  At least philosophically, this would be  
consistent with the future broadening of the program to embrace other
goals like quality educations.  The more mechanical formula approaches
of the Green bill, on the other hand, might tend to lock in a
clientele organized strictly by nose-counting.  At the same time, it
encourages more immediate administrative controls on the institutions
and perpetual haggling over the formulas.

     The most pertinent differences between the bills are in the field
of graduate education.  The Pell bill would establish a newly unified
program of federal fellowships, with benefits to schools that compare
with the actual cost of graduate education.  These programs are the
heart of advanced studies, not only for the doctoral-degree candidates,
but for the more studious undergraduates at the major universities.
Indirectly, this would restore some balance in recognizing a quality
factor in the overall program.

     This provision does not appear to be highly controversial, as 
between the two houses.  However, it does run counter to the implied 
policies of the Office of Management and Budget which have gone a long
way toward choking off support of graduate fellowships through the 
research agencies.  Unless Congress also believes that the country has a
basic surfeit of educated brainpower, rather than a shortage of useful
occupations, it should take care not to compromise a provision that is
essential for the maintenance of the highest educational opportunity.
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