The Academy for Educational Development was requested by the Bureau of Research in the Office of Education to look into planning for higher education in the U.S. and to make recommendations as to whether in the future some planning for higher education should be conducted on a nationwide basis and, if so, what type of organization might be responsible for conducting the planning. This interim report discusses some of the major findings from the field work. These findings include: (1) there is extensive general interest in the idea of national planning for higher education; (2) the most successful planning is carried out by some state coordinating agencies and regional organizations; (3) there is a great deal of planning by the institutions of higher learning, but the quality of these efforts is uneven; (4) major federal programs affecting higher education are carried out in the absence of any coherent set of national policies or plans; (5) a serious handicap to long-range planning is the lack of available data on current needs and costs, and on alternative strategies; and (6) college officials are thwarted in their planning efforts by conflicting views on how to meet societal problems and cope with student unrest. (AF)