Dear Mr. President:

May 10, 1963

Early in 1959 I put together the first long-range planning

projection for an institution of higher education.

Six months later I polished up the material, inserted some revised figures, and produced the Ashford College case study which was described by the McGraw-Hill people who published it as "a new tool for college and university management."*

In the next 36 months, that case study and the blank projection forms which go with it were used as a basis for projections by over 300 private colleges and universities. More than 200 of

Dexter Keezer et al, Financing Higher Education 1960-70, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, 1959.

these institutions debated their assumptions, their figures, and their problems in laying out a course of action for the future at the long-range planning seminars sponsored by the Fund for the Advancement of Education.

Recently the question has been raised as to why the technique. of long-range budgeting, used for many years by business but never before applied to colleges and universities, suddenly caught on. The answer is that this was the time when colleges and universities really needed a new tool of management because higher education was feeling the first puffs of the breeze that is about to develop into a hurricane of changes.

These changes can be expected to be dramatic, probably traumatic, and possibly fantastic in dimension. Jesse Hobson, former director of the Stanford Research Institute, pointed out in a speech a few months ago that the changes in our economy, our society, and our culture during the next forty years, to the year 2,000, can be expected to equal in significance the changes of the past 400 years, all taken together. There is no need to dispute him. Even if he were only half right, his observations were intriguing. They prompted me to send my statistical associates to Washington searching for facts and figures that would throw light on the educational implications involved. I asked them to dig into government files at the Census Bureau, the Office of Education, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other agencies in Washington. Some of the materials they found were published; much is unpublished and still in worksheet form. The purpose of these investigations was to come up with the best possible answers to five questions:

1

What is the outlook for population changes for the country as a whole, and by categories of the population?

2

What is the outlook for jobs, and what does this imply when it comes to training the labor force?

3

What is the outlook for college and university enrollments, particularly with respect to private as compared with public institutions?

4

What is the economic outlook; and if higher education can be expected to cost more, can the country afford it?

5

What does all of this imply for the average private college?

In order to pin down some answers to these questions, I asked my statistical associates to make projections for a generation ahead where possible (that is, from the "actuals" of 1960 or 1961 to, say, 1985), not because these could be considered as precise figures but because they would provide magnitudes to be kept in mind as policy decisions for higher education are made within the next few years. Briefly, the answers to my questions, the considerations involved in arriving at these answers, and a short summary of the most relevant statistics are as follows:

1 WHAT IS THE OUTLOOK FOR POPULATION CHANGES?

Changes in the total: During the generation ahead, the population of the United States can be expected to grow not so rapidly as during some years in the period immediately after World War II, but certainly at a high rate compared with prewar experience. In a conservative projection the U. S. Bureau of the Census estimated that the total population can be expected to rise from 179 million in 1960 to 214 million by 1970, to 260 million by 1980, and to 285 million by 1985 (see Chart 1.)

These figures assume that the birth rate will be at the 1955-57 levels during the generation ahead—not the highest level reached during the postwar period but a reasonably high level nevertheless. After some study and discussion with the Census Bureau people, we believe this assumption is as reasonable a basis for forecasting as can be developed at the present time.