Problems of the Small Technical College

VARIOUS FACTORS account for the smallness of some technical colleges. Perhaps the most obvious case would be the local college situated in a rural area where both the population and industry are thinly spread. Industrial development often tends to snowball, and, despite the amazing growth of technical education in some areas, there are other parts of the country where the industrial pattern has hardly changed since the war, and even areas where industries have left, making unemployment a serious problem. Alternatively, the small college may be a new one catering for a new and probably expanding industrial area. A third possibility would be the long‐established college surrounded by other well‐established colleges, all of which may have started to expand almost simultaneously within rigidly defined catchment areas, complicated possibly by awkward county or city boundaries. The net result may be not only that one college is left with too small a catchment area, but that it may be quite impossible to increase that catchment area.