tural and functional questions, and develop some special purpose eligibility systems to solve particular problems. We need a special-purpose eligibility system to solve the problems of the proprietary schools and defaults. We need a special-purpose eligibility system to enable new institutions and different institutions to have access to the same benefits which established institutions which are accredited by the membership agencies also have. I don't know if you want to go on with that or not. These are general views, and I can get more specific.

Mr. O'HARA. I have not yet read the Orlans report and I am going to have to do that before we conclude these hearings and get into those questions.

Mr. EDGERTON. I strongly encourage a hard look by this committee into that particular relationship, between eligibility and accreditation. I think an airing of the issue with the foundation developed by the Orlans report would be a very productive thing for this committee to do.

Mr. O'HARA. Well, I have already promised Mr. Dellenback and others that we will consider that question before we complete our investigation and I have an intention to do so.

Mr. Dellenback, any questions?

Mr. DELLENBACK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I must confess that I find this discussion provocative, and it raises a whole series of roads which we ought to walk down before we make a mechanistic or programmatic decision as a recommendation to the full committee.

I have felt very strongly this is a fund that has great potential, and the moneys that I see coming out of the Appropriations Committee at this stage are, in my opinion, inadequate.

Mr. O'HARA. Both you and others have spoken to me on that subject. Mr. DELLENBACK. Hopefully, it is a real interest which you expressed in the past and where we go will lead to some significant joint action. I think rather than ask questions on specifics, or on the ideas that you have been talking about-which are very valuable-I will not go into the details now.

I have no questions, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. O'HARA. Mr. Benitez, any questions?

Mr. BENITEZ. Well, in the first part of your talk pertaining to paradoxes of providing educational opportunities you talked about the growingly passive role of university education. What are the manifestations of that, if you can give me an answer to that question? Are you saying that education now is more passive than it was in the past? The question is: Is this the consequence of the democratization of the university?

Mr. EDGERTON. No, I think that education is intrinsically an institution in which young people are in a relatively passive role of reading. writing, listening, reflecting, abstract reasoning. That is fine, and there is an interesting debate as to whether or not academic institutions ought to involve themselves in additional kinds of nonintellectual activities or encourage students in them. The point I was trying to make is that this institution, which inevitably instructs people in a certain way, has now been expanded to encompass more than half of all high school graduates in the country; and whereas some people learn best as listeners, and as readers, and as abstract thinkers, there are a

lot of other ways to learn, including engaging in problem-solving activity, engaging in work, being asked to be on a task force to study higher education, testifying before a congressional committee-a variety of ways in which learning occurs. What we have done is to expand one style of learning to over 50 percent of the 18-year-olds in the country. That is a little simplistic, and a little strong, but that is the proposition.

Mr. BENITEZ. My difficulty with your explanation is in the assumption that reading a book is passive activity and it would seem to me as a confirmed bookworm, that reading a book can be not only very stimulating, but intellectually active and that in a basic sense we make a very serious mistake if we assume that activity, initiative, imagination, creativity doesn't involve movement and action. Most of the important things that you associate with man's intelligence take place without particular movements. So I didn't want the education involved in operating and working library-tabbed with the implication of passivity.

Mr. EDGERTON. I don't want them tabbed either. I would agree with that.

Mr. BENITEZ. OK. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. O'HARA. Mr. Lehman.

Mr. LEHMAN. I was just interested in that problem you brought out in which a fellow in national service would come after high school and he could receive the same kind of educational benefits that GI's did at the end of World War II and perhaps the Vietnam veterans are doing now. Would you anticipate any academic credit for this service?

Mr. EDGERTON. No.

Mr. LEHMAN. It would be just a form of equivalent but not military service by which they would gain a certain amount of educational benefits and serve as a buffer zone between what you seem to think of now as a meshing of high school with the 13th and 14th grades and no decisionmaking process?

Mr. EDGERTON. Right. It would be an alternative to national service. in the sense it is not a compulsory program like national service has been conceived as being. It would in a sense, be an incentive to legitimate stopping out. A high school student could make an argument to his parents. "If I stop out and work for a year or two, I will accrue benefits that can later be applied to tuition." It may encourage, our assumption is, an additional sense of direction, and sense of purpose and maturity. We found in the various studies that we have done, that this activity is positively related to this kind of maturity.

Mr. LEHMAN. I should say the most motivated people we ever had in higher education institutions were those that came out of the service of World War II. I don't know if we will ever find that group again any place, but what you are trying to do is look for them.

You mentioned college work-study. The problem I found with work-study is that it is too narrowly targeted either for those who work in the school itself or in nearby nonprofit organizations. I certainly would hope to see work-study assistance broadened to include others than nonprofit organizations and also academic credit given for their work rather than, you know, sweeping up a library or raking leaves in the campus grounds where most or too much of this work is now.

Mr. EDGERTON. I respect fully disagree, though, with the notion that work in and around colleges necessarily has to be given academic

42-884-75-13

credit. Our recommendation is that a service learning or a worklearning experience can be a very important thing for a student, whether it is recognized with credit or not, that work-study could be encouraged to become more than a financing technique and a genuine kind of educational experience; that somehow we have to provide incentives to colleges not to have students do the kind of mundane things that colleges need to have done, but to make these work experiences a reproductive experience.

I would encourage some coordination and thinking between the university for action program and the college work-study program because I think they have paved the way for some of the kinds of things that work-study could do.

Mr. LEIMAN. Thank you. That whole idea of this national service for the college benefits is something that we really have to look at a long way down the road. We do not have any kind of legislation for this right now, have we?

Mr. O'HARA. They have a provision like that in the ACTION agency. No funds are in it, though. At least we have none this year either, I understand. But they have a program. Mr. Edgerton, I thank you very much for coming before us. I look forward to seeing you again with your other hat on touching on subjects of mutual concern. Thank you.

Our last witness today is Dr. Margaret Gordon of the Carnegie Council on Higher Education which, as you are all aware, has done so much valuable work in the field of higher education. Dr. Gordon will discuss the student financial assistance recommendations of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Her prepared statement will be printed following her testimony.

STATEMENT OF MARGARET GORDON, CARNEGIE COUNCIL ON HIGHER EDUCATION

Dr. GORDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to apologize for Clark Kerr's not being able to be here this morning. He has had an exceptionally heavy schedule in recent months and it was going to be rather complicated for him to fit this in. I am going to try to be a very imperfect substitute for him. Mr. O'HARA. We are pleased you can be with us.

Dr. GORDON. Let me say that the Carnegie Commission did its work over the period from 1967 to 1973. It issued 21 special reports, its final report, and a great many other publications. In discussing the issues this morning, I will be presenting the views of the Carnegie Commission, which went out of existence in the fall of 1973, rather than those of the new Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, because that council has not yet had an opportunity to review all of the issues relating to Federal aid. It will be doing so during the course of the next year and may conceivably move away from some of the commission's recommendations.

I think, if you go over the Carnegie Commission reports, the 21 special reports, and the final report, in which the commission's own policy recommendations were presented, that you will see very clearly that a central and overriding concern of the commission, throughout its 6-year history, was with ways and means of overcoming the barriers

to equality of opportunity in higher education for young people from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds.

Its first report, which was issued toward the end of 1968, recommended substantially increased Federal aid to higher education with emphasis on grants to low-income students and cost-of-education supplements, which would accompany these students, for their institutions. Seven other reports of the commission were primarily or almost entirely concerned with issues of equality of opportunity.

Before getting into what the commission recommended on various aspects of student assistance, I would like to call attention to the fact that very considerable progress was made from the mid-60's to 1972 in increasing the relative representation of low-income students and of minority groups in higher education, but for some reason, this progress seems to have been reversed between 1972 and 1973. I refer you to the chart on page 6 of my prepared statement and the table on page 8. Chart I on page 6 shows a drop in the percentage of freshmen coming from the lowest family income quintile, between 1972 and 1973, and a drop also for those from the second lowest, an increase for the other quintiles.

Somewhat correspondingly, both the ACT freshman data and U.S. Bureau of the Census preliminary data for the fall of 1973, as shown in table 1, show a drop in the enrollment rates of blacks, both male and female.

Now, we don't know exactly what was responsible for these trends, but we know that financial aid offers have been quoted as indicating that they felt some institutions were falling behind or reversing their previous emphasis on opening the doors to low-income and disadvantaged students. We also can speculate that the great delay in getting the basic opportunity grant regulations out, as well as the snafus over the "needs" test in the guaranteed loans program may have had something to do with this drop in enrollment rates for low-income students in 1973. I am going to come back to a few more comments on that at a later point.

Now, first of all, I would like to discuss the basic opportunity grant program. This was a major step, the adoption of this program, toward implementing the principle which the Carnegie Commission has endorsed since 1968, of basic grants that would be structured to increase equality of opportunity for low-income students, but would also encourage free student choice of institution and field of study. Such a program would also represent a form of Federal aid to higher education that would help to preserve the autonomy of colleges and universities. Apart from the very well known fact of extremely inadequate funding, I would like to call attention to several other weaknesses that we see in the BOG program.

It is probably no surprise to point out that the eligibility conditions are very restrictive and, in some respects, through not all, appear to be more restrictive than the College Schalarship Service standards, which have been used widely by colleges and universities.

Second, the limitation of the size of the grant to 50-percent of the cost of education tends to discriminate against low-income students whose most feasible option is attendance in neighboring low-cost public institutions. I think the paper that Hartman did for the Joint Economic Committee brought that out extremely well. The size of the

grant for such a student is frequently sharply reduced by the 50percent cost limitation, whereas the student who is nearer the upper end of the income band of families eligible for BOG grants is much less likely to have the size of his grant reduced because of the cost limitation.

So, in the report, "Who Benefits?"-the actual title is much longer that appeared in June, 1973, the Carnegie Commission recommended that for lower-division students the cost limitation should be increased to 75 percent. This is in line with the commission's general feeling that financial barriers to participation in higher education should be particularly minimal in the first 2 years of higher education, and I shall come back to that later in connection with tuition policy.

I think that very serious consideration in the longer run should be given to removal of the cost limitation completely from the basic opportunity grant provisions. That would be consistent with what the commission said in its first two reports on Federal aid, where it recommended no cost limitation except that the size of the grant should not exceed the student's total cost.

Now, my third point about the BOG program is that we feel that the $1.3 billion recommendation in the administration's 1975 budget is not adequate, particularly if one considers the highly restrictive eligibility conditions that are involved. In "Who Benefits?" we estimated that adequate funding of the program would range from about $1.7 to $2.3 billion, depending on how many extra students were induced to enroll through the program, and incorporating the 75percent cost limit for lower division students.

I would now suggest that an estimate of adequate full-funding would range from $2 billion to about $2.6 billion, taking into account increases in cost in the last year or so and taking into account some relaxation of the family income eligiblity conditions, which we would like to see. That estimate, interestingly, is almost exactly equivalent to the one that was included in the Brookings report on the 1974 budget. It was not developed on precisely the same basis, but it comes out very much like the Brookings estimate.

Turning to the supplementary opportunity grants program, I would say that the basic opportunity grants reflect the kind of Federal student aid program that the Carnegie Commission had in mind more clearly than the supplementary opportunity grants, patricularly in uniformity of treatment of all students and encouragement of freedom of student choice.

We would suggest that the provision in the existing legislation, that no basic opportunity grant payments can be made until there is a certain amount of funding of the SOG program, should be removed. I think that very serious consideration and careful study need to be given to the future role of the supplementary opportunity grants program. We have some serious questions about it. I am sure the members of the subcommittee are familiar with the two reports of panels of the College Entrance Examination Board which analyzed the way in which grants were awarded under the economic opportunity grants program which preceded the supplementary opportunity grants

program.

I can't go into detail about what those reports said, but the gist of it was that there was very little tendency for low-income students