Interest in the establishment of external degree programs and programs for off-campus higher education has been accelerated throughout the country by the recognition of the need for new approaches to the extension and improvement of higher education opportunity and for ways of reducing the cost of education to both students and taxpayers. State and national college proficiency examination programs were inaugurated during the past decade, continuing education programs expanded, and colleges without walls or open universities established. Increased emphasis on the external degree is a logical outgrowth of these developments. In spring 1971, the Chancellor of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education appointed two study teams to (1) study the feasibility of an external degree program as a means of providing an alternate form of higher education in Massachusetts; and (2) develop recommendations concerning a possible administrative and organizational structure for the proposed external degree program. This document presents the results of the second study, and the conclusions and recommendations are based on information about the Massachusetts higher education system obtained from reports and memoranda, from analysis of legislation, from personal interviews with leaders of government and higher education, and from information about plans for the implementation of external degree programs elsewhere in the country. (Author/HS)