Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

Small by Design: Resilience in an Era of Mass Higher Education
Promoting Access and Choice
The prestige and popularity of liberal arts colleges
rose during the same decades that their share of American
higher education enrollments began to shrink. Why
Most important, parents, guidance counselors, prospective
students, and even state legislators respected their traditions
and educational effectiveness. Still, the public interest
included repeated overtures for small private colleges to play
an expanded role in absorbing the new generation of collegebound
students. Nowhere was this urging more evident than
in Alexander Astin and Calvin B.T. Lee’s 1971 study for the
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, The Invisible
Colleges: A Profile of Small, Private Liberal Arts Colleges with
Limited Resources.
Two distinct types of policy recommendations grew
out of this study. First, state governments and several national
educational groups were encouraged to seek ways to ensure
that private colleges could remain affordable to a wide range
of students by family income and resources. This policy goal
resulted in thoughtful state scholarship programs during
the 1970s, which allowed eligible high school graduates to
receive tuition credits for study at any accredited college
within the state, whether public or independent. These
programs increased both access and choice for students
by allowing portability. Second, liberal arts colleges were
encouraged by state officials to consider substantial increases
to the size of their student bodies.
Independent colleges worked hard to remain
affordable. This effort meant devoting increased institutional
resources to scholarships and financial aid. At many small
colleges, it also meant adhering to a tradition of thrifty
stewardship to keep expenses—and thus tuition charges—
relatively low. These internal initiatives were enhanced by
public policies that allowed private colleges to participate
in state programs. California and New York offer good
examples. The Association of Independent California Colleges
and Universities and the Commission on Independent
Colleges and Universities in New York worked with their
state governments to create public scholarship programs that
allowed qualified students to make financially affordable
choices. By 1978 more than 30 state governments had
established student financial aid programs that could be useful
at independent colleges within the state. This philosophy
of institutional and government cooperation on financial
aid blossomed at the national level in 1972 with the federal
government’s creation of the Basic Educational Opportunity
Grants (which later evolved into the Pell Grants).
Many private two-year colleges also responded to the
growing wave of college-bound high school seniors, which
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