As recently reported in The chronicle of Higher Education (January 7, 1980), enrollment in colleges and universities is expected to decline about 4 percent during the 1980s. This decline in student enrollment, which may exceed 40 percent in some states, will be one of the major problems facing higher education during this decade.
Currently the bulk of political science enrollment of most colleges and universities is in introductory courses. These courses are primarily composed of students majoring in other disciplines who are taking an introductory political science course (usually the introductory course in American Politics) to fulfill a degree requirement. Most of these “service” students take no additional political science courses. As a result, the “continuation scores” — the number of additional political science courses taken — of most introductory course students are very low.