The Vision 2000 program was initiated in 1988 to review the mandate of Ontario's Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology. Five study teams and a steering committee were involved in the program. Study Team 1's task was to provide an empirical snapshot of the current college system and its external environment. At the outset of its work, Study Team 1 intended only to gather background material for the other four study teams. In the course of conducting its research, the team discovered the trade-offs inherent in the relationships among educational quality, access to postsecondary education, and educational funding. Responses to these trade-offs seemed to play a key role in determining the performance of the college system. This final report of Study Team 1 begins with a description of how the college system has responded to the quality-access-funding tradeoff in the past decade, then looks forward to speculate on how conducive the future environment will be to improving quality and access. The report concludes with a set of recommendations on support structures and revenue and funding. The recommendations address the need to gain a better understanding of and better strategies to deal with the trade-offs; to increase the allocation of public and private resources to the colleges; to improve the accessibility of college programs to part-time learners; to improve the likelihood of success of underprepared students; and to bring to the forefront the importance of adequate funding. An appendix entitled "The College System--An Empirical Snapshot" provides detailed data in five sections on: college students; educational programming; colleges and alternative educational systems; financial analyses; and college staff. (JMC)