Those Hot Colleges on the Climb

By Ezra Bowen

Twenty years ago, it was a patch of forest outside Olympia, Wash. Today it is the site of Evergreen State College, a newly thriving liberal arts institution that last year was mentioned in a U.S. News & World Report survey of university and college presidents as one of the nation's better schools. Evergreen is one of a set of ambitious schools that in the past half a dozen years have emerged from academe's boondocks or thereabouts to reach for national recognition. All the institutions in the sampler below, along with a growing corps of like-minded schools, have risen under the hands of dynamic presidents. Each offers a special learning opportunity, some at bargain rates, to high school seniors hoping in this climactic month of the admissions season to get accepted by a decent college they can afford.

EVERGREEN. On opening day in September 1971, the library stood only half built, its books stored in a brewery. "We didn't have any buildings or dorms," recalls Physics Teacher Byron Youtz. Some classes met in local churches, and one convened on a lakeshore. Faculty members had no promise of tenure, and the curriculum consisted--as it still does--of Socratic seminars, Great Books courses and the like. Instead of grades, students got written evaluations, and still do. The original student body of 1,000 included a fair number of hippie types, to the dismay of the down-home state legislature, which showed a recurring tendency to try to cut off funds. But Evergreen hung on.

In 1985 Joseph Olander became president, seemingly an odd choice to continue building a college that had been under fire. A high school dropout and former street brawler, Olander taught himself to read from repair manuals and science fiction at a U.S. Air Force station on Canada's Baffin Island. Suddenly enchanted with education, he says, "I simply left the world of being a hoodlum" and worked his way through a number of degrees to a vice presidency at the University of Texas, El Paso; there he earned a dual reputation as an innovative manager and cheerful nut who liked to dress up as Darth Vader. At Evergreen, in addition to making appearances as the Pink Panther and the Easter Bunny, Olander has chopped some administrative positions and taken hold of a budget that, while hardly lavish ($7 million), amounts to a vote of confidence from once skeptical lawmakers. The faculty stands behind him and supports the no-tenure system.

Most pleased of all seem to be the students, now nearly 2,800 strong and mature (average age: 24). "They don't just teach you things," says Junior Michael Tobin, 31. "They teach you how to learn." Tuition for 1986-87: $1,212 for an in-state student, $4,206 for out-of-staters--not bad when total costs for some colleges have topped $15,000.

TRINITY. "I don't see anything wrong with academic elitism at all," says Ronald Calgaard, president of Trinity University in San Antonio. Five years ago, it was just another pretty good liberal arts school with 3,269 students and a $127.5 million endowment. Then Calgaard, who had arrived two years earlier from the University of Kansas, got going to make Trinity "the Amherst of the Southwest." He pushed the endowment close to $200 million and made no secret of what he would do with it. "We buy faculty," he says.

Last year the school also lured 121 National Merit Scholars with $5,000 annual aid packages and spent an average of $1,000 each in recruiting other students. Since 1981, average SAT scores have risen from 1095 to 1200, and the student body has been cut to 2,759. "Colleges should expect a higher quality of work," says Calgaard, "and if they don't get it they simply shouldn't pass the student."

Meanwhile, full professors' salaries jumped from an average of $31,723 to $45,693, enabling the philosophy department to hire away professors from Harvard, Princeton and Yale--"pretty good pedigrees," observes Chairman Peter French. Calgaard claims that Trinity's excellence runs across the board, and notes that, thanks to the endowment, Trinity will charge a relatively modest $6,960 for the coming school year. As a result, he says, Trinity can strive for "elitism that is academic rather than socioeconomic."

UMASS, BOSTON. The University of Massachusetts at Boston has a campus dug out of a harborside dump site and faces ferocious competition for students and faculty; some 55 other nearby colleges and universities, most of them private and including Harvard and M.I.T., tend to gobble up any good academic body.

UMASS has wisely not tried to go head-to-head with its established neighbors but has carved out a unique mission, which Chancellor Robert A. Corrigan describes as taking "the land-grant concept of service, research and teaching, and bringing it to the urban area . . . to be a force in the community." The school cashed in on its location by establishing an impressive environmental sciences program and will soon open an urban harbors institute. Its John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs has worked with local government to develop programs in housing, juvenile justice and industrial finance. Some 60% of the special programs in Boston's public schools are sponsored by UMASS, Boston.

The faculty of 500 boasts more Harvard Ph.D.s than any other Massachusetts school except Harvard. Teachers are drawn to UMASS by the research opportunities, salaries ($48,000 for a full professor) and the 12,500 highly motivated students, whose average age is 27. Says Senior Bob Carlson, 24: "Students here are hustlers. They're concerned about the community . . . they want things for their families."

UMASS is far from perfect: some lab facilities are crowded, as are many classrooms, and the school has none of the usual collegial amenities for the all-commuter student body or staff. McCormack's director, Edmund Beard, admits that UMASS "has all the problems of a new kid on the block and then some." But, he adds, "it's well on the way to making a name for itself, and it's the greatest educational bargain (next year's in-state tuition: $1,296) in New England."

DEPAUW. "Nine years ago, when we hired Dick Rosser as president, DePauw was slipping," says Eugene Delves, trustee chairman of the small (2,350) private university in Greencastle, Ind. Not anymore. DePauw is described in the latest edition of a leading college guide as "now clearly on its way back up." A prime source of the uplift has been money, in record amounts. A fund drive that started three years ago has topped $106 million, most of it from DePauw's uncommonly loyal alumni.

School officials have ticketed the interest from $43 million for student aid, and have available the interest from an additional $30 million from the endowment. Some 400 alumni find recruits, and DePauw students stage phone-a- thons with prospective freshmen. Part of the push is aimed at leavening DePauw's in-state enrollments (37% of the student body) with outlanders, who now come from 40 states and 17 foreign countries. Next year's tuition will be no steal ($8,200), but 60% of DePauw's students get aid.

While other colleges generally are holding down tenured positions and trimming new appointments to meet crunching costs, DePauw's primary faculty concern seems to be how many people to add: trustees will consider a faculty committee's recommendations to add ten to twelve spots to a full-time tenure staff that now numbers 146. Other DePauw dollars are going into undergraduate centers that combine learning with professional training. Best known is the Center for Management and Entrepreneurship, which attracted Student John Curran, among others, to DePauw. Curran, 22, has completed a six-month ( internship with Eli Lilly & Co. in Indianapolis. At the same time, he says, "I've been able to take my history and philosophy, my Greek and Roman mythology. It's an ideal bridge between a liberal arts degree and a practical education."

GEORGE MASON.

George Johnson, the no-nonsense president who has presided over the dynamic emergence of George Mason University, ten miles across the Potomac from Washington, unblushingly describes his public university's mission. "We are entrepreneurial," he says, "responding to the needs of our community." That community is rich Fairfax County, Va., one of the nation's fast-growing areas, loaded with high-tech corporations employing professionals who demand continuing education. "We have CEOs who want doctorates in economics," says Johnson. "Their wives are considering going to law school."

For GM's 17,094 students, the school has concentrated on the region's best fields of opportunity: public policy, high tech and the performing and fine arts. All at bargain rates: in-state tuition will be $1,680; out-of-staters will pay $3,336.

When Johnson arrived in 1978, he says, the school was still regarded "as a second-tier institution, with no cohesiveness and notable for its can't-haves. We weren't allowed a law school or a program for doctorates." GM now has both. And Johnson vows there will be more where all this uplift has come from. "We will reach the level of Carnegie-Mellon in eight years," he says. "We will soon be a national university."

ROLLINS. Five years ago, when Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., had a reputation as a fun-in-the-sun country club, President Thaddeus Seymour ordered studies of what ailed the place and how it might be cured. The studies concluded that small was good, and the best way for Rollins to upgrade was to build on strong points and dump weak departments.

Seymour started by killing his undergraduate business studies. "That was the riskiest step," concedes Provost Daniel DeNicola, "since one-third of the students were majoring in business." Communications studies suffered the same fate. Concurrently, Rollins revived its classics programs--Latin, Greek, languages, literature--and built a well-stocked new library. Results have been fast and favorable. Applications, despite an upcoming tuition of $8,591, have reached a 5-to-1 ratio for every freshman spot, while enrollment has been held to 1,370. And Rollins' still well-tanned but much more serious graduates have come into demand: last year every one of its medical-dental school candidates was accepted. Claims Spokesman Ober Tyus: "Rollins is the pre- eminent small liberal arts college in the Southeast."

U. MIAMI. Contemplating the results of studies like those made at Rollins, University of Miami, Fla., President Edward Foote in 1981 began taking even more draconian measures. He ended the private university's undergraduate education program and told the graduate schools of nursing, law, education and medicine to pay their way. He stopped admitting virtually any warm undergraduate body that showed up, and began cutting enrollment from 12,000 toward 8,500, setting stiffer standards for entering freshmen. At the same time, Miami established schools of communications, architecture and international studies. Associate Provost James Ash openly admits that the purpose of the changes has been to sell the school to a higher grade of students. "It's not that we're virtuous," he says. "Marketing conditions force us to do this."

Miami is now trying to lure scientists and prospective scientists by stressing research opportunities in such regionally important fields as weather science, marine biology, tropical diseases and geriatric ailments among Florida's huge senior citizen population. "We're rapidly becoming this generation's Stanford," exults Foote. But if Miami's reach still exceeds this bold grasp, Ash is convinced the school's recent steps have been in the right direction: "We're not educating the masses anymore." Apparently not. Tuition will be $8,840.

RHODES. James Daughdrill, head of little (1,060 students) Rhodes College in Memphis, is a devout bottom-liner. President at age 25 of a $17 million carpet and textile business, he chucked it all in 1964 to study for the Presbyterian ministry, then in 1973 took charge of an obscure, financially rocky college called Southwestern at Memphis. In his first year he turned an operating deficit of $1.2 million into black ink, and has not been in the red since. In 1978 he took on the faculty and eliminated an all but automatic tenure system that Daughdrill says "made it impossible to recruit new faculty." Then recruit he did. Today, 83% of the school's newly strengthened cadre of professors are Ph.D.s.

In 1984, Daughdrill made a move that "catapulted us from confusion to clarity"--by getting the trustees to change the school's name from Southwestern to Rhodes. "We're not even in the Southwest," he says. "And ^ you couldn't tell if we were a college or a university or an extension of another campus somewhere." Promising high schoolers are scrambling for Rhodes' generous aid packages, which go to 71% of the students and currently average $5,865 a year (tuition will be $7,660). Such help prompted a crack student like Sophomore Ann Sartwell to turn down Carleton, Duke and Northwestern, primarily because Rhodes offered her "quite a bit more money than any of the other schools." Contemplating his achievements, Daughdrill claims, "Rhodes College is the hottest small college there is."

BROOKLYN. A decade ago, Brooklyn College hit bottom. Open admissions had brought a flood of 35,000 students, many underqualified. "It was not unusual to have students reading at sixth-grade level," says President Robert Hess, and Brooklyn could not afford to teach them. When New York City agreed to state demands to end open admissions as a condition for financial rescue, Hess moved fast. In two years, he recalls, "we lost 12,000 students and every member of the faculty who did not have tenure."

Hess and his newly lean faculty rebuilt the school around what may be the most tightly structured core curriculum in the U.S. Every Brooklyn student must take the 34-credit, ten-course study, which ranges from Homer to Descartes to African culture to computer literacy and chemistry. Each of the core studies requires exhaustive reading, writing and thinking. Impressed by the back-to-basics elegance of Brooklyn's curriculum, some 60 colleges sent observers last year, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation bestowed a grant of $250,000, to defray the cost of the visitors. Most important, Brooklyn is providing a first-class education at fourth-class prices ($1,250 for New Yorkers; $2,500 for anyone else). Said an impressed visitor from Williams last year: "You're so good we thought you were private."

Evidence is mounting that born-agains like Brooklyn and newcomers like Evergreen, once regarded as fall-back alternatives, are performing handsomely in their unique roles. And though not even their most ardent booster could claim they have surpassed Harvard or Berkeley, the life preparation they provide may be more appropriate for many students than that in the established sanctums of learning. As the unquenchable Joe Olander puts it, "The question then is, who's the alternative to whom?"

With reporting by David S. Jackson/San Antonio and Michael Riley/ Los Angeles, with other bureaus