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Good schools come in all sizes. Occidental College (1,400 students), a tranquil oasis in hurly-burly Los Angeles, grabbed two of the Southwest's four Rhodes scholarships last year. One of the country's best creative-writing departments, headed by Novelist Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The Oxbow Incident), is run by giant (11,000 students) San Francisco State College. And what about Virginia's tiny (400 men) Hampden-Sydney College? It tops all U.S. colleges in percentage of graduates with doctorates in physics, and is tenth in percentage of graduates listed in Who's Who.
NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Few schools of such caliber are really hungry for freshmen—but they do want more good ones. "We can always make room for the gifted student," says President Frederick Bolman Jr. of Pennsylvania's Franklin and Marshall College. The problem is the country's severe scholarship shortage (available: only $100 million for 690,000 needy students). And rich schools have the cash. President Fred 0. Pinkham of Wisconsin's Ripon College says bitterly: "We have lost any number of good students after offering them $800 scholarships. Harvard and Yale offered $2,500—they just bought 'em up."
If this means students who do no more than demolish aptitude tests, Harvard is not certain that it "bought" the right commodity. "Skill in taking such tests may be emerging as a national attribute," complained a Harvard faculty committee on college admission policy last week. The scores rise year by year: Harvard's current freshman class's median score was 691 on the math aptitude test, almost 100 points higher than the class of 1956. But real "intellectual promise" may be something else, suggested the committee. And all the emphasis on numbers has an ominous effect: "Who can say how many gifted youngsters are frightened away from Harvard?"
Each year 150,000 able students are frightened away from higher education, mostly for lack of money. But opportunity for them is emerging, notably through an extraordinary proliferation of public community colleges (total U.S. enrollment: 900,000). California leads the way with 63 such institutions (400,000 students). They provide both a terminal course for technicians, and a two-year course for academic students who can transfer to the state's highly selective university system. This pattern is emerging across the country, taking the heat off state universities, which stand to enroll 65% of all college students by 1970. It is bound to improve many big schools, even in the face of soaring enrollment.
A GOAL TO WORK TOWARD
One glittering example of how the universities may develop is Michigan State's remarkable new liberal arts branch at Oakland (TIME, Sept. 28). Completely reversing the "tech and ag" image of its parent institution, Oakland is an avowedly intellectual school limited to such rigorous matters as rhetoric, Russian, philosophy of science. Last month Oakland's first 570 freshmen got the shock of their lives: 43% flunked in chemistry, calculus and economics. Nothing like this ever happened at old M.S.U. Says 18-year-old Mike Deller: "It's rough, really rough. But I'm glad. Some day it's going to mean something to say you graduated from here."