# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1950_S901
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES 203

tions would admittedly be a hazardous proposition. The Board
for Higher Education is convinced, however, that an experiment
in junior college operation should be undertaken under these con-
trolled circumstances and that the Fort Wayne situation is almost
ideally constituted for this very purpose.

2. Portland, Oreg.

The Board for Higher Education recommends that the Port-
land, Oreg., institution serve as one of the pilot schools for obser-
vation of a four-year junior college program (junior and senior
high school years; freshman and sophomore college years). Actual
introduction of the program to be subject to the- prior consent and
the request of the local administration. This school would, then,
constitute a West Coast experiment in the expansion of an exist-
ing academy to a four-year junior college and offer opportunity
to observe the effects of gearing an institution to increasingly popu-
lar sequences of elementary and secondary education: 6—4—4 and
6—3—3. (For a detailed analysis of this trend, see Exhibit 7,
page 205.)

This is a type of arrangement which ought to receive attention
and ought to be carefully examined, but not be applied to all of
our institutions without careful testing. It may well be that serious
recruitment problems would result from such a change, since the
freshman year cuts into the middle of a standard type of program.
Nevertheless, a rather considerable interest in this type of com-
bination has been evident in American education. There are al-
ready 64 four-year junior colleges listed in the standard yearbook
of the American Association of Junior Colleges.

For our own purposes this arrangement offers an opportunity
to eliminate a high school (operated in Portland for 45 years) and
to set up a junior college without operating more than a four-year
program.

While the long-term outlook does not indicate that Synod
should continue the operation of separate high schools, there is
insufficient evidence at this time to justify the reduction of all
~ schools to four-year units, but the opportunity to experiment with
... this type of unit in selected instances should be grasped. The ex-
periment proposed here would give Portland the stability which
comes from the junior college years and would also give Synod
an opportunity to see whether or not it can afford to apply such
arrangements generally without completely losing the advantages
which it now has.

Of course, it would be necessary to develop an appropriate
recruitment program to actually determine whether the loss of the
freshman and sophomore high school years must necessarily affect
the total enrollment at such an institution.