Like every other gatekeeper at the nation's most besieged campuses, Amherst's harried Dean of Admission Eugene S. Wilson finds himself warning applicants against name brands in colleges. Says he: "Learning is something a student does with books and a teacher who cares. A student's intellectual growth depends far less on geography—which college—than on what advantage he takes of the opportunities that surround him wherever he is." In sum: if at first you don't succeed, look far, travel wide, and find another good college. The U.S. is full of them.
In an adjoining box, TIME lists 50 private four-year liberal arts colleges that can give a good education to the high school senior who cannot get into Amherst & Co. Those listed are good, but not the only good ones. Some have long been topnotch, others are in the process of making names for themselves. What most of them have in common is that if they are not nationally known, they deserve to be. One happy result of the U.S. race for college is the rising fame of colleges that seemed obscure only a few years ago. Such good small schools as Carleton. Claremont Men's, Colby, Lawrence, Mills, Occidental, Pomona, Reed or Scripps are hardly "unknown" any more. Each is now almost as tough to get into as the East's most favored campuses—and well worth trying.
Among TIME'S "unknowns," or insufficiently known, nearly all have fewer than 1,500 students. Almost all require the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test; many also demand the Achievement Tests and sometimes the new "Writing Sample." Few have application deadlines, though all advise early applications. Most were church-founded, and though direct church control is rare nowadays, many still require chapel and religion courses. Liberal education is the primary task at hand, not religious indoctrination. About half the professors in each hold doctorates—well above the national average. Big universities, when raiding small campuses for staff, tend to steal researchers. The schools listed are largely pure teaching institutions, a boon to "late bloomers."
High Standards. They also attract early bloomers: 63% of current freshmen at St. Paul's Macalester were in the upper 5% of their high school classes; 20 are National Merit Scholars. Missouri's West minster, where Winston Churchill made his "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946, boasts that not one of its recommended graduates has been turned down at a medical school of his choice for three decades.
Last year, Westminster boasted the top Medical School graduate at Harvard, second at Cornell, third and fourth at Penn.
Ohio's College of Wooster has turned out some three dozen college presidents, including the noted scientist brothers Compton—Karl (M.I.T.), Arthur (Washington University) and Wilson (Washington State University).