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96 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who stay in school beyond second-
ary education will increase sufficiently to offset the decline in the
total number. But with the increase in the number of people in their
mid-thirties and forties who have received a college degree earlier,
there are going to be large numbers of highly schooled people who
want advanced professional training and retraining, whether as doc-
tors, lawyers, architects, engineers, executives, or teachers. What do
these people look for? What do they need? How can they pay? What
does the traditional university have to do to attract and satisfy such
very different students? And, finally, what are the wants, needs, val-
ues of the elderly? Is there indeed any one “older group,” or are there
rather several, each with different expectations, needs, values, satis-
factions?
Particularly important in age distribution—and with the highest
predictive value—are changes in the center of population gravity, that
is, in the age group which at any given time constitutes both the
largest and the fastest-growing age cohort in the population.
At the end of the Eisenhower presidency, in the late fifties, the
center of population gravity in the United States was at its highest
point in history. But a violent shift within a few years was bound to
take place. As a result of the “baby boom,” the center of American
population gravity was going to drop so sharply by 1965 as to bring
it to the lowest point since the early days of the Republic, to around
sixteen or seventeen. It was predictable—and indeed predicted by
anyone who took demographics seriously and looked at the figures—
that there would be a drastic change in mood and values. The “youth
rebellion” of the sixties was mainly a shift of the spotlight to what has
always been typical adolescent behavior. In earlier days, with the cen-
ter of population gravity in the late twenties or early thirties, age
groups that are notoriously ultra-conservative, adolescent behavior
was dismissed as “Boys will be boys” (and “Girls will be girls”). In
the sixties it suddenly became the representative behavior.
But when everybody was talking of a “permanent shift in values” or
of a “greening of America,” the age pendulum had already swung back,
and violently so. By 1969, the first effects of the “baby bust” were
already discernible, and not only in the statistics. 1974 or 1975 would
be the last year in which the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds would
constitute the center of population gravity. After that, the center would
rapidly move up: by the early 1980s it would be in the high twenties
again. And with this shift would come a change in what would be