"Postsecondary" education, that is, education beyond the 12th-grade level, includes vocational, technical, trade, and business schools as well as two- and four-year colleges. The institutions may be public, private, or proprietary. Emphasis on the wide spectrum stems from a national tenet--that there is honor and dignity in work whether it is solely intellectual, primarily physical, or a blend of the two, by the same token, the integrity of learning, of job preparation, can be as valid outside the traditional world of academe as it is within and from a belief in freedom of individual choice. In recent years, provision of postsecondary opportunity for all the nation's youth has been a national educational priority, and the largest single share of government support for higher learning has been used to reach this goal. Federal assistance to higher education began more than a hundred years ago with land grants for the establishment of colleges to teach the agricultural and mechanical arts. It continued with the G.I. Bill; the Education Act of 1958; the Higher Education Act of 1965, which established the Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant, the College-Work Study Program, Guaranteed Student Loan Program; and the 1972 Amendments to the Higher Education Act, establishing a new Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program that reaffirms the principle of postsecondary education as a right, not a privilege, which must be accessible to all who qualify. Together, the various federal programs help several million needy students each year. (Author/KE)