Student Power: First Wave

In contemporary America, the immediate transition from high school to college is becoming more and more common. According the the NCES, this trend really began in about 1980, when overall enrollment rates rose from their stable trend of 50%. This trend reached it's peak at 67% in 1997. And while "declined through 2001 to 62 percent before increasing to 69% in 2008" SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2010). The Condition of Education 2010 (NCES 2010-028), Indicator 21.

This proliferation of the bachelor degree has kind of pro-cyclical effect, where attaining a B.A. becomes more and more necessary to gain a minimum income that pays enough to ensure the middle-class lifestyle, such as giving once's one's children a college education.

The roots of this trend are traced to “the mid-1950s,” writes historian Eric Foner, “there were 2.7 million college students. By 1968, thanks to the coming of age of the baby boom generation and the explosion of institutions of higher learning that accompanied it, the number had risen to over 7 million” (288). Slowly, as a demand for higher education grew so did the supply of institutions. This trend allowed for better self-selection and choice for students; and, as this dynamic has persisted, the relationship between students and the education institutions that attend has become less paternalistic and more attuned to student's demands as consumers. As a result, students now enjoy much more choice, autonomy and empowerment at their universities.

But in the 1960s and 70s, this was not the case. The increasing number of students enrolling into colleges and universities grew at an astounding rate, much faster than new current institutions could manage. For context, by 19xx, university students outpaced farmers, miners and steelworkers in their proportion to America's overall demographics (Foner 288). Clearly, institutions of higher learning could not adapt to the influx right away.

This is important because this directly contributes to what would become the student power movment. The epicenter of the this new wave of activist students was, in the words of historian Eric Foner, the “quintessential Cold War 'megaversity,' Berkeley, which was an immense, impersonal institutions where enrollments in many classes approached one thousand students (290).

Understandably, many students reacted negatively to, in the words of activist Joel R. Kramer "the typical university is only slightly more democratic than the Army, if less unpleasant" (13). Both at Berkeley and other large state universities, “students spoke of loneliness, isolation and alienation, of powerlessness in the face of bureaucratic institutions, of a hunger or authenticity that affluence could not state” (Foner 288-89). But, the anger and anguish among this especially among young and relatively carefree set of individuals was unfocused and not entirely new.
Pockets of student radicalism have emerged in numerous times of crises. For example, in the Thirties, “there was intense student protests related to the deepening political-economic crises in Europe and the United States,” explains political scientist James Woods (xv). What set the student power movement of the 60s and 70s apart, and what makes this history so important for our understanding of MassPIRG today, is not just the student disaffection itself; but how the political context of the time channeled these feelings into serious action. As Walter Laqueur explains, "Youth movements have come and gone, but never before has one been taken so seriously" (19).

What made the student power movement so regarded not only in the context of the ear, but also today, requires some unpacking. The demographics factors described above were a direct cause for the motivations of the student-power movements, but it was the Black Power Movement that paved the way, giving student power activists both the vocabulary and a template for the eventual movement.