The New Elite

Of the many themes that U.S. educators have sounded since the war, few have commanded quite as much attention as: How can the nation make sure that its brightest high-school students will go on to college? Last year the U.S. got one answer with the formation of the most ambitious, privately supported scholarship program in history. Last week, from its headquarters in Evanston, Ill., the National Merit Scholarship Corp. announced the names of its first winners--the 556 members of the new elite who now bear the title National Merit Scholars.

When the corporation started in 1955 as a result of a study by the Ford Foundation, it had $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York for operating expenses and $10,000,000 from the foundation to be spent on scholarships over the next ten years. It also had $8,000,000 to match any scholarship set up by a private company within the program and $2,000,000 for administration. But the total amount would have supported only 167 scholarships a year. N.M.S. President John Marshall Stalnaker, former dean of students at Stanford, started a campaign to get corporations to participate. Eventually he had 23 companies lined up, ranging from Sears, Roebuck, which finances 100 scholarships, to the Bryant Chucking Grinder Co. (machine tools) with one.

To find its first winners, N.M.S. gave a "screening test" to 60,000 high-school seniors, all of whom had to be within the top 5% of their classes. That test reduced the number to 5,200, and college-board exams whittled it down further to 4,800. After that an eight-man board of educators took over. The board studied each applicant's academic record, his school's recommendation and his own extracurricular activities. After a week the board finally picked the winning 556.

Those who needed no financial help got only the honor of being National Merit Scholars. Others got small grants of $100, still others were marked down for as much as $2,100 a year. N.M.S. also gave to the colleges the students picked (the favorites: Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech and Cornell) an amount, up to $750. equal to each college's tuition. But the more important boon to U.S. higher education lies in the young talent it has spotlighted, much of which it might never have seen. Among the 1956 winners:

P: Janette Ross, 17, who spent most of her childhood in an isolated log cabin in the wilds around Anchorage, Alaska. Her father is a fisherman and trapper, and Janette got most of her early schooling through correspondence courses from Baltimore's Calvert School. Now enrolled at Oregon's Lewis and Clark College, she hopes some day to become an author.

P: Stephen Lichtenbaum. 17, who. along with Buffalo's David Krantz. now at Yale, made the highest score on the various N.M.S. tests. The son of a U.S. Treasury civil-service worker in Brooklyn. Stephen graduated top of his class from James Madison High School, won a Westinghouse Science Talent award for a problem involving the theory of numbers. His major at Harvard: mathematics, though he may switch to theoretical physics.

P:Thayer (Ted) Watkins, 18. of Denver. The son of a factory worker and a waitress, Ted worked his way summers as a dishwasher, salad cook, spray painter and apprentice engineer in a local rubber factory. In his spare time he puttered about his school laboratory over such experiments as determining the nitrogen in wheat and recovering the tin from tin cans. Had it not been for his $2,000-a-year scholarship. Ted could have earned a degree only by going to school at night. Now he is studying to be a chemical engineer at M.I.T.

With its first 556 winners safely installed on 160 campuses across the U.S., N.M.S. is planning to test 135,000 high-school seniors this month, and with at least seven more companies giving support, it will raise the number of scholarships to about 700. Says its Vice President Edward C. Smith: "We are locating and establishing a real sacred-cow group."

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