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PREPARED STATEMENT OF PAUL H. SHEATS

My name is Paul H. Sheats. I am the statewide dean of university extension at the University of California. My headquarters are on the Los Angeles campus of the university, where I also hold the post of professor of adult education. I speak in support of S. 580 not only on behalf of the institution of which I am a statewide officer, but also as immediate past president of the National University Extension Association, an organization with approximately 100 institutional members representing both public and private universities and colleges of the United States.

It was my privilege to testify before this committee on similar legislation a year ago. That testimony is a matter of record and I wish to reaffirm the statements which I made at that time.

It must be conceded that since most of my professional career has been devoted to the administration of university programs of continuing education I can scarcely be considered a completely objective or disinterested witness. But, apart from any personal commitment, the events of the past year have only underscored the social urgency of this legislation. We simply cannot afford in the national interest the wastage of human resources which results from our failure to provide additional opportunities for continuing education at the university level. Without the fiscal support provided in S. 580, the resources of our universities and colleges cannot be applied effectively to the removal of barriers to social and economic advance.

The National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago has recently completed an extensive study of the educational pursuits of American adults. Twenty-one percent of all organized programs for adults were offered by colleges and universities and the estimated gross number of persons participating (2,640,000) was exceeded only by churches and synagogues. The citizens of this Nation do place major reliance upon the colleges and universities and can be expected to take advantage of the expansion of offerings which Federal support will make possible.

Moreover, it is crystal clear from the NORC study that the higher the educational attainment, the greater is the rate of participation in continuing education. "*** The results show convincingly that the more education one has, the more likely it is that one will engage in additional learning experiences, and this represents a kind of spiraling effect not dissimilar to the way in which a capital investment accumulates with increasing magnitude under a compound interest structure."

The authors of the study do not even qualify their prediction that an adult education explosion within the next decade can be expected. To quote specifically the report states, "The typical participant today is young, urban, and well educated, and this is exactly the type of person who will be around in greatly increased numbers about 10 years from now. Just as in the fifties and sixties the regular school system has had to tool up rapidly to accommodate the greatly increased numbers of young people in the population, so too in the seventies the field of adult education will experience increased demands as this population cohort moves into the social and demographic categories where greatest use is made of adult education. Moreover, because formal education has such a strong impact on participation rates, the likelihood of increased numbers of older participants is also quite strong. More 50-, and 60- and 70-year-olds will engage in educational pursuits 20 years from now, because at that time the educational attainment of people in these age brackets will, on the average, be considerably higher than it is today."

I spoke at the outset of the wastage of human resources as a threat to our survival as a free nation. Let me be more specific :

A recent study at Harvard estimates that out of the 30 percent of American youth most academically able, one-half of the boys and one-third of the girls fail to finish college. The dropout is estimated at 400,000 a year, or 4 million in the sixties, which, as Max Lerner has commented, could well means the difference between the survival of open societies and their death. This situation presents a disastrous wasting of the best brains we have in the rising generation and can be corrected in part at least by an expansion of college level offerings for adults. The Rockefeller panel reports now available in their entirety under the title, "Prospect for America," pinpoints the wastage of human resources in terms of four catgories: