Lithopolis' Loot

Worried about soaring tuition costs?

One solution could be a move to Bloom Township, Ohio, a small farming community (pop. 3,500), set in rolling corn country twelve miles outside Columbus.

The township has no college, but it does incorporate a tiny hamlet called Lithopolis, and that is all it needs. The place is the home of the Wagnalls Memorial, a small foundation that hands out scholarships to all comers--and wishes, in fact, that more would come.

Quartered in a Tudor-style stone mansion rising improbably above surrounding frame houses and tree-lined streets, the foundation was established by the late Mabel Wagnalls Jones in honor of her parents, Adam W. Wagnalls, a Lithopolis boy who co-founded the Funk & Wagnalls publishing firm in 1877, and his wife Anna. When Mabel Jones died in 1946, she bequeathed $2.5 million to provide scholarships for any and all Bloom Township youths who could complete four years at one of the two high schools in the area and wanted to go on to higher education. Today the fund's officers manage an investment portfolio whose value has grown to $7.5 million--more than enough to make good on the standing Wagnalls Memorial offer to Bloom Township students of $1,500 a year while they are in college and $2,000 annually if and when they go on to graduate work. The scholarships do not cover the total cost of college tuition, room and board, which now averages $2,300 a year on state campuses and $3,200 at private institutions; yet they should be attractive.

Evidently, they are not. Much to the distress of the fund's trustees, the Wagnalls generosity seems to satisfy neither the local students nor the Internal Revenue Service. Though 159 Bloom Township boys and girls are currently receiving Wagnalls scholarships, the potential is much higher. Despite the Wagnalls largesse, only one in three Bloom Township seniors bothers to go on to college; so far only six of last June's 86 graduates have sought Wagnalls' support.

Meanwhile, the IRS is unhappy about the unspent cash that is piling up in the fund's accounts. Although the fund disbursed $134,163 in scholarship aid last year, its income from investments totaled $325,000. The IRS requires all tax-exempt foundations to pay out at least 5.5% of their net asset value each year in the form of charitable contributions.

That means that the Wagnalls Fund has to increase its scholarship handouts to something more than $400,000 a year; the federal taxmen have given the fund until the end of next year to bring its annual payout up to par.

Embattled Fund. The Wagnalls trustees have been mulling over their embarrassment of riches in their impressively decorated Lithopolis board room.

Some officials want to spend the excess Wagnalls money in new fields--study-abroad programs, continuing education for housewives, courses in gardening, consumer awareness and, of course, tax law. To soften the impact of the IRS's 5.5% rule on the fund's assets, Fund Director Jerry W. Neff aims to "change the mixture of our investments to emphasize income more and growth less."

Beyond that, he hopes to find out why local students are not more interested in going to college.

When Wagnalls officials began passing out checks 28 years ago, Bloom Township farmers snickered that they needed a water and sewage system far more than they needed scholarships; their children, too, evidently see their future in corn rather than ivy. But relief is in sight for the embattled fund. Local real estate dealers, who have been hawking the scholarships with all the vigor of Wagnalls trustees, have stirred up a small invasion of outside home buyers.

The influx is expected to push the township's population to an education-minded 10,000 by the end of the decade.

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