The scale development of higher education? Scale expansion is the most remarkable feature of the development of American higher education in the 30 years after the war. Before World War II, with the development of land-grant colleges, junior colleges and research universities, American higher education gradually showed a diversified development trend and its scale also expanded significantly. According to statistics, during 1900, there were 977 colleges and universities in the United States. In 1940, the number increased to 1 800, and the size of colleges nearly doubled. At the same time, the number of college students has also increased from 238,000 in 1900 to 1940, an increase of more than five times.

However, during World War II, due to the war, the scale of colleges and universities was greatly reduced. After the end of World War II, the United States quickly recovered from the trauma of the war, and university campuses began to proliferate, with a surge in enrollment. By the autumn of 1949, the number of American college students had exceeded 2.4 million.1The enrollment rate of young people aged 8 to 24 reached 15%, and they began to step into the stage of popularization of higher education. Judging from the college students in this period, about half of them studied in public universities, and most of them concentrated in four-year universities, and less than 10% of them studied in two-year junior colleges.

From 1950s to 1960s, the scale of American higher education was further accelerated. On the one hand, a large number of young people flood into universities, on the other hand, public universities expand rapidly to meet this enrollment demand. Throughout the 1950s, the number of college students increased by 49%, and the enrollment rate of school-age youth increased from 15% to 24%. By the 1960s, the number of students enrolled increased by 65,438 +0.20%. By the end of 1969, the enrollment rate of school-age youth reached 35%, of which 74% attended public universities and about 25% attended two-year junior colleges. ? After 1970s, the scale expansion of higher education began to slow down. Similar to the 1950s, the number of students enrolled in this period increased by 45%.

Among them, the proportion of part-time students has greatly increased, which is mainly due to the rapid development of two-year colleges, and its enrollment has nearly doubled during this period. ? Generally speaking, during the thirty years from 1945 to 1975, the number of institutions of higher learning increased by nearly a thousand, from 1768 to 2 747. The number of students enrolled increased from10.677 million to1.1.85 million, and the number of degree-granting increased from10.57 million to10.666 million, which increased by about/kloc respectively. By 1974/75, the enrollment rate of school-age youth in higher education has reached 40.3%.