The Academically Average

Five years ago, Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa was a classic example of the fading U.S. church-related college. Founded in 1875, Presbyterian Parsons was so broke that its entire endowment was in escrow. While other U.S. colleges fended off armies of applicants, Parsons, with a total enrollment of 212, could not even attract stragglers through newspaper ads. One jump ahead of the sheriff, it was barely two jumps from losing accreditation.

Last week, billing itself as "the fastest growing college in Mid-America," Parsons announced a booming fall enrollment of 1,487 students from 37 states. The debts are gone; the college is self-supporting from student fees alone. New buildings are sprouting, faculty salaries have almost tripled to an average $7,200, and gifts have nearly doubled to about $300,000 a year. What hit Parsons?

Flunkees & Indians. The answer is a pudgy, cyclonic Presbyterian minister named Millard Roberts, 41, who had made an impressive record as fund raiser for Manhattan's Brick Presbyterian Church. Swirling in as president in 1955, he treated Parsons like a sick factory. To beef up sales, Roberts fanned fast-talking admissions men throughout the Midwest and the East. He freely discounted freshman fees and even more freely solicited flunkees from other colleges. He welcomed high school graduates in the bottom half of their classes, and took some who stood dead last. Almost anyone with an IQ of 100 is now a shoo-in--and 90 will do.

More than 60% of Parsons' freshmen used to quit every year from boredom. Roberts fixed that: he brought in six national fraternities and sororities, jazzed up band and football uniforms, hired Count Basic and Woody Herman for spring proms. When he introduced the trimester system this summer, he spiced the package with a noncredit term touring Europe after the junior year. To make Parsons a summer festival, he staged a moonlight Mississippi cruise. Soon due: a summer semester-end blowout, complete with genuine Indians holding up a stagecoach, and contests to choose a Miss Frontier and catch a greased pig. The freshman dropout rate has fallen to 17%.

Cut Courses. Roberts has not neglected quality control altogether. Marginal students get stiff tutoring, and most of them have done well. Of 86 flunkees imported last fall from other schools, all but eight averaged C or better, and four got straight A's. Like any shrewd businessman, Roberts has also eliminated unprofitable branches: 400 courses have been cut to 169, and it is no longer possible to major in art or music or study creative writing.

To ensure a steady capital flow, Roberts got top Midwest executives to serve as trustees, gives most of Parsons' honorary degrees to industrialists. As for personnel, he lures promising young professors with good pay and such fringe benefits as free membership in the Fairfield Country Club. Of Parsons' 80 faculty members, 42 have doctorates, a ratio in Iowa second only to Grinnell College.

Academic purists may dispute Roberts' methods, but he thinks he has the success formula for penniless U.S. church colleges. All they have to do, says he, is realize that in the dizzy U.S. race to college, "somebody has to pay attention to the academically average guy."

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