ABSTRACT
In the past decade the United States has seen a fantastic boom in higher education. Nothing like it has ever happened in any other country or in any other period of history. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it would be fallacious to equate the quantity of increase in college attendance with the quality of the product. College attendance, if not graduation, is now viewed by most middle-class parents as an essential ingredient for their children's getting ahead in the world, and the pressure on today's high school graduates to ‘go on to college’ is enormous. Increasing numbers of youths are forced to college not by aptitudes for and interests in academic studies, but in pursuit of the educational union cards that so many view as the sine qua non of the good life in our education-conscious society. In the past fifteen years American colleges have increased in enrollment from about 3 million to 7.1 million. Some 40 per cent of American youths now continue their formal education beyond high school.
