and students. We well know that such pluralism brings variety, and at any given moment produces differences in goals and standards. Believing in the free marketplace of ideas, we welcome and encourage differences of opinion and variations in institutional style. As far as I can sense our national mood, there are few who believe that we should give up our decentralized pattern of education. There may be debate on what part the Federal Government should play in education; there is no debate on whether it should direct what is taught to whom and by whom. Such direction we simply do not want, and will not permit.

The goal of pluralism, however, with its related limitation on direction of curriculums or personnel, does not remove responsibility for education from the Federal Government. It only sets boundaries within which it must work. In a complex, technological society that lives and grows by innovation, education cannot be considered solely as a service to the individual in the cultivation of his talents and intellect. It is also an area of essential public investment in economic growth and national security. Educational policy is inexorably linked to equality of opportunity, to full employment, to economic growth, to international trade, to foreign policy. For the Federal Government to neglect the instrument of society best adapted to develop its greatest resource-the intelligence of its people would be as foolhardy as to neglect its responsibility in national security. The Government must have a policy and a program; the question is not whether to have them but what policy and what program should be adopted. As the President stated in his January 29 message on education, the policy should be "selective, stimulative, and where possible transitional." S. 580 is the result of an assessment of the present state of education in meeting the Nation's needs. It is based on the dual assumptions that the national interest requires the maximum development of human potential, and that the personal interest of every citizen requires equality of opportunity. In contrast, the facts are that our educational institutions and our States, despite valiant efforts, are not meeting the standards set by these dual assumptions.

Consider our loss of talent because of limited educational attainment:

One out of every three students in the fifth grade now drops out of school before high school graduation. Only 2 of every 10 now graduate from college.

Thirty percent of the high school seniors in the 80-90 academic percentile of their class and 43 percent of the 70-80 percentile fail to enter college.

Consider the social costs of the close correlation between unemployment and low educational attainment:

One of every 10 workers who failed to finish elementary school is unemployed today, as compared to 1 out of 50 college graduates.

In March 1962, persons of 18 years and older who had not completed high school made up 46 percent of the total labor force. Such persons, however, comprised 64 percent of the unemployed.

Consider the inequality of educational opportunity and attainment in the Nation:

Nearly 70 percent of the young white population have graduated from high school, but only about 40 percent of our nonwhite population have completed high school.

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Of our adult population, 25 years and older, 6.2 percent of whites and 22.1 percent of nonwhites have completed less than 5 years of school.

Almost 12 percent of young white adults (age 25-29) have completed college, while only 5.4 percent of this age group in the nonwhite population have done so.

While 11 percent of the total population is Negro, Negroes make up only 3.5 percent of all professional workers. Consider the barriers to college education because of low family income:

Median annual family income is now $5,700. The average annual student cost of attending college is now estimated at approximately $1,480 for public and $2,240 for private institutions. The cost of one student in college for the median family requires well over 25 percent of the income each year. Consider growing higher education needs for facilities compared to actual expenditures:

By 1970, we will have 7 million students in our colleges and universities, nearly 3 million more than we have today. This will require $2.3 billion a year for facilities-over a billion dollars more than we are spending today for this purpose.

By 1970, we will need to graduate 7,500 Ph. D's each year in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering if we are to continue our economic growth and preserve our military security-but in 1960 we graduated only 3,000.

Consider, finally, the changing nature of our manpower requirements and the rising educational levels necessary to carry on the work of the Nation:

The fastest growth of our labor force is that of highly trained professional manpower requiring 16 or more years of education. Since 1952, jobs in this category have grown from 4.5 to 7.5 million.

Technician and semiprofessional manpower requiring 1-3 years of postsecondary education is the second fastest growing category in our labor force. In the last decade over 2 million new jobs were created here a growth of 40 percent.

Jobs filled by high school graduates rose 30 percent while jobs for those with no secondary education decreased 25 percent in the past decade.

The methods proposed in S. 580 to help our institutions to meet the needs shown by these facts, so that a future report to your committee can show substantial progress, are stimulative in nature. They are based on the assumption that the individual State or institution is best qualified to decide how it should proceed to meet the purposes set by the Congress. By selecting certain programs, and by providing matching grants to stimulate new solutions to problems, the Federal Government's policy is designed to strengthen the hand of State and local institutions and to encourage them to adopt programs that will meet national goals. Matching grants and loans are generally here proposed. The long history of such programs in other areas-medical research, highways, the preservation of natural resources-shows that programs of stimulation of local and State activity can accomplish national purposes without bureaucratic direction and loss of personal

Mr. Chairman, in the time available to me today it is patently impossible to do justice to all of the components of S. 580, but I will try to illustrate these Federal policies with reference to the several parts of your bill.

In the light of the President's June 19 message on civil rights and job opportunities, I would like to give special attention to the impact of the proposed educational program upon our No. 1 domestic problem-equal rights and equal opportunities for all our citizens. For, as the President pointed out, the enjoyment of civil rights is largely a function of employment opportunities while the availability of employment opportunities is largely a function of educational attainment: "There is little value in a Negro's obtaining the right to be admitted to hotels and restaurants if he has no cash in his pocket and no job." But the exceedingly high rates of Negro unemploymentmore than twice that of white workers-cannot be substantially reduced until Negro educational opportunities are massively expanded and Negro manpower skills are drastically upgraded to meet modern technological requirements.

In this context, we are hopeful that the Congress will give special attention to the administration's January 29 proposals and last week's amendments, which propose to (1) modernize and expand the Nation's vocational education programs and (2) launch a Federal-State cooperative venture to eliminate the scourge of adult illiteracy. We ask this not merely in the name of equal rights and equal opportunities for our Negro citizens, but in the name of every taxpayer and citizen who desires to see his country both strong and prosperous. As the President pointed out:

Although the proportion of Negroes without adequate education and training is far higher than the proportion of whites, none of these problems is restricted to Negroes alone. This Nation is in critical need of a massive upgrading in its education and training effort for all citizens. In an age of rapidly changing technology, that effort is failing millions of our youth.

Nor, in the President's view, is there any question that we can afford the legislation proposed in S. 580 to strengthen American education "at every level from grade school through graduate school": the loss of 1 year's income due to unemployment is more than the total cost of 12 years of education through high school; and, when welfare and other social costs are added, it is clear that failure to take these steps will cost us far more than their enactment. There is no more profitable investment than education, and no greater waste than ill-trained youth.

Title V-A of S. 580 would redirect, expand, and modernize programs of Federal financial assistance in vocational education so as to assure that vocational training offered by our schools will be both of high quality and realistic in terms of the Nation's projected manpower needs and job opportunities.

As I recently stated in testimony before the House General Subcommittee on Education (the full text of that statement on vocational education has been made available to the committee and for the record):

under present trends some 30 to 40 percent of the youngsters now in the fifth grade will probably not be graduated from high school unless we undertake vigorous reforms. They will go to work-or vainly look for work-without a high school diploma. They should have the opportunity,during their too-brief

1 See p. 2371.

period of schooling, to acquire at least the rudiments of some skill or trade. This applies also to most of the other 60 percent who, we now estimate, will complete high school only. About half of these boys and girls will go to work or keep house, or both, after graduation. The others will enter college or some post-high school educational institution, but less than half will acquire a college degree. To put it another way, less than 20 percent of today's fifth graders will become college graduates-the physicians, scientists, lawyers, and teachers of tomorrow. A large number of those who do not complete college will join our nonprofessional working population-in business, in the trades, in industry, in the service occupations and on the farms. Their schooling should prepare them to start their working life.

The training to be supported under the Vocational Education Act of 1963 (title V-A of S. 580) would be focused upon needs of high school students, persons who have completed or discontinued their formal education and are preparing to enter the labor market, adults now employed but in need of upgrading in their skills or of learning new skills, and young men and women with special educational handicaps. Our proposal also calls for the construction and equipping of urgently required area vocational education school facilities and for increased emphasis on services to improve the quality of vocational education programs, including inservice teacher training, teacher supervision, program evaluation, demonstration, development of instructional materials and administration.

The new draft proposals submitted to the Congress last week would supplement the vocational education programs proposed earlier in S. 580 in five ways in order to accelerate the rate at which our fellow citizens and particularly our minority groups in urban and other areas suffering from a high incidence of school dropouts and youth unemployment-may gain marketable job skills and, consequently, full membership in the community of trained manpower needed by our dynamic economy:

(1) Appropriations authorized for fiscal year 1964 are raised from $23 million to $108 million.

(2) Funds earmarked for postsecondary education and construction of area vocational schools are raised from 25 to 40 percent.

(3) The Commissioner of Education is authorized to make grants to States for the establishment of experimental residential vocational schools. For this purpose the sum of $15 million is authorized for fiscal year 1964.

(4) Funds for grants by the Commissioner of Education for special projects to meet the needs of communities with substantial youth unemployment and school dropouts (as well as to meet the needs of youth with academic, socioeconomic or other handicans to learning) would be increased from 5 to 15 percent of the vocational education appropriations.

(5) A work-study program for high school age students enrolled in full-time vocational education programs is proposed in order to encourage and assist youths who might otherwise drop out of school to continue their education and equip themselves for gainful employment.

These amendments, Mr. Chairman, represent substantial increases in the national investment in vocational education, but they are small in terms of the goals to be achieved and the cost to us all if we do not

Exactly the same is true about what can only be termed the national disgrace of adult illiteracy and adult educational deprivation. In the world's wealthiest country it is shameful to have to acknowledge that we have about 23 million Americans aged 18 and older who have completed less than 8 years of schooling, including 8 million adults aged 25 and older with less than a fifth-grade education. These cold and impersonal statistics are only now coming to be appreciated as representing some of the most critical problems faced by our society: persistent unemployment, dependency on welfare payments, rejection from military service, delinquency and crime, as well as the probability of blighted and arid lives, impoverished by the loss of opportunities to learn and to grow socially and intellectually.

I would greatly appreciate having my recent statement on this problem made a part of my testimony at this point. I believe that the committee will also wish to study the accompanying Department of Health, Education, and Welfare study, "Limited Educational Attainment" 3 which, better than my words at this point, indicates the extent and consequences of this most depressing fact about American educational achievement.

President Kennedy's message on civil rights and job opportunities further relates this problem to my earlier remarks, and I quote him:

A distressing number of unemployed Negroes are illiterate and unskilled, refugees from farm automation, unable to do simple computations or even to read a help-wanted advertisement. Too many are equipped to work only in those occupations where technology and other changes have reduced the need for manpower-as farm labor or manual labor, in mining or construction. Too many have attended segregated schools that were so lacking in adequate funds and faculty as to be unable to produce qualified job applicants. And too many

who have attended nonsegregated schools dropped out for lack of incentive, guidance or progress. The unemployment rate for those adults with less than 5 years of schooling is around 10 percent; it has consistently been double the prevailing rate for high school graduates; and studies of public welfare recipients show a shockingly high proportion of parents with less than a primary school education.

I hope, therefore, that the committee will agree with the President's recommendation that a solution of this problem well deserves the modest level of financial support proposed last week, namely, $20 million, instead of the $5 million originally earmarked in the 1964 budget for the pilot, demonstration and instructional programs authorized in title VI-B of S. 580.

Turning now to other provisions of S. 580, in their basic order, let us look at "Title I: Expansion of Opportunities for Individuals in Higher Education." Our democratic ideals as well as our intellectual, economic, scientific, and cultural progress require that every individual have an opportunity for the most advanced training of which he is capable. Unfortunately, the rising cost of a college education is preventing many students of modest means from attaining that important personal goal while shortages of highly trained manpower have become a characteristic part of our national economic problems. The committee will note from the chart and table attached to my testimony how markedly college costs have risen and are projected to rise; in public institutions, for example, from a low of $730 in 1930 to some $2,400 in 1980. In the school year 1962-63, the average direct cost

2 See p. 2378.

See p. 2384.

See pp. 2393, 2394.

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