America's Private Colleges and Universities have entered the bicentennial year expressing deep concern for their individual and collective futures. They seem constantly engaged in a search for new students and additional financial contributors; they darkly aver that they may be forced to close forever if their search fails; and they point to the dozens of others campuses that passed from the scene in the last decade as proof of the urgency of their case. To some observers these forebodings of doom may appear, like the associated press reports about Mark Twain's demise, greatly exaggerated. But the immediacy and intensity with which they are expressed suggest the worth of evaluating the case of the independent sector of modern higher education.