JACK SMITH, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, recently called attention to two full-page ads that appeared in TIME. One was for Antioch College, a small (under 2,000 students) liberal arts school in southwestern Ohio; the other was for an even smaller college in Wisconsin, VITERBO COLLEGE: BERKELEY WE AIN'T, its message began. What seemed to intrigue Smith was that two such small schools could afford such ads in a national magazine. He reported that when Raymond Colvig, the public-information manager for the University of California (and its Berkeley campus) saw the Viterbo ad, he wrote the college: "We agree completely that Berkeley you ain't. As a matter of fact, Viterbo we ain't. Should we buy a TIME ad to get this message out?"

What Smith and Colvig did not realize was that neither college paid for its ad. Theirs were two among more than 100 full-page regional ads that TIME has donated to colleges during the past year. The program began with an ad for St. Joseph's College, a small school in Indiana, which reports that, so far, the appeal in TIME has brought in more than $80,000. Our purpose is to help alleviate an increasingly perplexing plight of big and small colleges: chronically short of advertising dollars, most cannot afford the kind of influential messages that will attract a diversity of students and faculty and a healthy flow of funds.

When the program was announced, we said that the magazine "might run as many as 50 free ads a year." Within a few months, we had requests from 500 educational institutions. Some requests had to be turned down because the school was unaccredited or did not meet the criteria of "demonstrating the imagination and scope that will appeal to TIME's readers." Others faced the problem of conceiving and executing an effective ad. While we received many remarkably fine homemade ads, some widely missed the level of graphics and style likely to please the TIME audience. Rather than disqualify colleges whose ads were inadequate, we enlisted advertising agencies that, on a voluntary basis, professionally recast the colleges' rough copy and graphics for greater impact. Creative services have already been contributed by nearly 35 agencies, some of them advertising giants, such as J. Walter Thompson, BBDO, Doyle Dane Bernbach and McCann-Erickson.

In letters of appreciation, school executives have credited TIME ads with drawing gifts as high as $500,000, and for record staff and student recruitment from social and geographic areas that they previously were unable to reach effectively. And long after their issues are off the newsstands, the colleges send reprints of their ads (we provide 2,000 free and any additional at cost) to alumni and friends. Although we now have a very large backlog of ads that we have promised to run, we are still receiving and considering new ads from worthy colleges.

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