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SERVING THE CAUSE By the later 1950s many were predicting that a "tidal wave" of students would begin flooding the colleges in the early 1960s, once the first postwar babies began reaching eighteen and as a college degree became as customary as a high school diploma already was. Enrollment in four-year colleges, which stood at 3,130,000 in 1960, did reach 6,290,000 a decade later. Whether this amounted to a tidal wave is debatable, but by 1970 several opposite trends in higher education were discernible. Some young people were deciding that there was little merit for them in the traditional undergraduate curriculum. Either they did not come to college or, once there, they soon dropped out. Older observers, noting the decline in the birth rate which began in 1958, started to warn that at some point in the foreseeable future there would be fewer and fewer college-age youths and, unless a larger and larger percentage than in the past elected higher education, decreasing enrollments were inevitable. Nevertheless, by the fall of 1980 there were about 7,570,000 enrollments in four-year colleges, more than five times as many as there had been in the fall of 1941 and more than 30 percent of all college-age young people. The increase in the number of baccalaureate and first-professional degrees was comparable: from 185,346 in 1942 to 996,357 in 1980, about 47 percent of which were awarded to women. What was written in the previous chapter to describe Adams county in an earlier period can be repeated here. Between 1945 and 1985 it "continued to be a small, rural, agricultural county." Its seat of government, Gettysburg, whose population increased from 5,916 in 1940 to 7,194 in 1980, remained by far the largest borough within its limits. Never even moderately industrial, Adams did not experience anything to compare with the growth in manufacturing which characterized York and other counties after 1945. Thus it was scarcely affected by the movement of firms and people to the South and West, to the so-called Sunbelt, which eventually crippled many industrial economies in the North and East and which dramatically altered the relative standing of states in the nation. The number of seats allocated to Pennsylvania in the United States House of Representatives dropped from 33 in 1940 to 23 in 1980. During the same period California gained twenty-two seats and Texas, six. After 1945 Adams usually ranked among the top two counties in the state in the production and processing of apples, cherries, and peaches; these and related activities were a major source of income for its residents. Especially during and after the Civil War centennial in the early 1960s, tourism reached new heights and was another major source of income for countians. Several sizable real estate developments in the eastern and southern parts of the county brought an influx of new people, which helps explain why Adams 74