A fitting motto for Swarthmore College near Philadelphia would be the exhortation that a Quaker math professor used to give her students: "Use thy gumption." Though it seems pathetically small (547 men, 447 women), Swarthmore has such gumptious devotion to excellence that some awed academics call it the No. 1 college in the U.S. However impious this may appear to Yale or Harvard, hundreds of the country's brightest youngsters have reason to agree. Of 2,000 applicants in a typical year, Swarthmore enrolls only about 260—making it one of the toughest colleges in the U.S. to get into.
Swarthmore,* which last week began celebrating its centennial year, was founded by the liberal Hicksite Quakers to combat "a dead level of mediocrity in the education of our children." For a while it was best known as "the Quaker matchbox," a 300-acre playground for sowing Quaker oats and finding Quaker mates. But ever since the 1920s, when pioneering President Frank Aydelotte set the matchbox on intellectual fire, Swarthmoreans have won all sorts of academic honors.
Character & Compassion. U.S. headquarters of the Rhodes scholarship program, Swarthmore is a mother lode of university presidents, among them California's Clark Kerr ('32) and Cornell's James Perkins ('34). Few colleges claim more names in Who's Who; few boast alumni so diversely successful—Novelist James Michener, U.S. Budget Director Kermit Gordon, Industrialist Thomas B. McCabe (Scott Paper), and Pitcher Dick Hall ('53), Swarthmore's gift to the Baltimore Orioles.
Swarthmore attracts few rich students, prep school products or Roman Catholics, and only 12% of the students are Quakers. More often, it lures "faculty brats"—a fourth of the lowerclass-men's parents are school and college teachers. Though endowment is a relatively modest $33 million (market value), scholarships are generous—26% of the students get an average $1,000 a year.
Of this year's 280 freshmen, 84% came from the upper fifth of their high school classes, half had college board aptitude scores of 700 or above (tops: 800), 33 had National Merit scholarships. Going beyond test scores, Swarthmore also demands character, asking applicants such offbeat interview questions as "What is your principal shortcoming right now?" "We look," says the admissions dean, "for a kid with a bit of compassion."
Crackling Classrooms. What typifies Swarthmore is a passionate intellectual jousting that makes seminars crackle. When a professor recently remarked, "Rousseau doesn't make the distinctions Hume does," a typical coed fiercely whispered, "Damn right!" Although half the students are on intercollegiate athletic teams, Swarthmore is a school where varsity-lettermen refuse to wear varsity letters. An alumnus proudly recalls four years of debating with a philosophy professor on ontological proof, "with each of us reversing his position at least twice."