Address by Commissioner of Education Earl McGrath, The Junior College and Educational Opportunity in the United States
Images (14)
Document
| id |
id
73983116
|
|---|---|
| contentType |
contentType
document
|
| source |
source
import
|
Source image fields (6)
Extracted text
OCR Page 1 of 14THE JUNIOR COLLEGE AND EDUCATIONAL
OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES*
In November 1944 I had the pleasure of addressing a meeting of
Junior College representatives in Chicago. I said then that if the
junior colleges of the country would gear their programs to the real
needs of American youth we would see an enormous growth both in the number
of institutions and also in their student bodies. One who attempts to
forecast the development of any such complex thing as an reducational
institution, perhaps forgivably gets a certain satisfaction when his pre-
dictions come true. We all rejoice, I am sure, in the fact that the
junior colleges have greatly increased in numbers and that the enrolments
in these institutionshave also risen rapidly since 1944. According to
the listing in the United States Office of Education there were 413 junior
colleges in the United States in 1944. Today this number has risen to
519. In 1944 there were 84,616 students registered in junior colleges
while today that figure is 252,132.
We may expect a continued, and indeed an accelerating, growth in the
junior colleges. If we include all types of community colleges, I believe
that by 1960 there will be more than a thousand of these institutions in
the United States. The principal factor in this forecast is the conviction
that our people are committed to the principle that all American youth
should have such education as they are able to profit from. We have always
believed this. In the early days of the republic the principle was adopted
+Address by Earl James McGrath, U.S. Commissioner of Education, Federal
Security Agency, Washington, D. C., at Annual Convention of the American
Association of Junior Colleges, Roanoke, Virginia, March 29, 1950.
Published in Junior College Journal, May 1950, Vol. XX, No. 9, pp. 505-512.
Reproduced in part in The Education Digest, Vol. XVI, No. 2, October 1950,
pp. 5-8; Vital Speeches Vol. XVI, No. 15, May 15, 1950, pp. 467-69.
Relations
belongs_to