Little Known

Like every other gatekeeper at the nation's most besieged campuses, Amherst's harried Dean of Admission Eugene S. Wilson finds himself warning applicants against name brands in colleges. Says he: "Learning is something a student does with books and a teacher who cares. A student's intellectual growth depends far less on geography--which college--than on what advantage he takes of the opportunities that surround him wherever he is." In sum: if at first you don't succeed, look far, travel wide, and find another good college. The U.S. is full of them.

In an adjoining box, TIME lists 50 private four-year liberal arts colleges that can give a good education to the high school senior who cannot get into Amherst & Co. Those listed are good, but not the only good ones. Some have long been topnotch, others are in the process of making names for themselves. What most of them have in common is that if they are not nationally known, they deserve to be. One happy result of the U.S. race for college is the rising fame of colleges that seemed obscure only a few years ago. Such good small schools as Carleton. Claremont Men's, Colby, Lawrence, Mills, Occidental, Pomona, Reed or Scripps are hardly "unknown" any more. Each is now almost as tough to get into as the East's most favored campuses--and well worth trying.

Among TIME'S "unknowns," or insufficiently known, nearly all have fewer than 1,500 students. Almost all require the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test; many also demand the Achievement Tests and sometimes the new "Writing Sample." Few have application deadlines, though all advise early applications. Most were church-founded, and though direct church control is rare nowadays, many still require chapel and religion courses. Liberal education is the primary task at hand, not religious indoctrination. About half the professors in each hold doctorates--well above the national average. Big universities, when raiding small campuses for staff, tend to steal researchers. The schools listed are largely pure teaching institutions, a boon to "late bloomers."

High Standards. They also attract early bloomers: 63% of current freshmen at St. Paul's Macalester were in the upper 5% of their high school classes; 20 are National Merit Scholars. Missouri's West minster, where Winston Churchill made his "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946, boasts that not one of its recommended graduates has been turned down at a medical school of his choice for three decades.

Last year, Westminster boasted the top Medical School graduate at Harvard, second at Cornell, third and fourth at Penn.

Ohio's College of Wooster has turned out some three dozen college presidents, including the noted scientist brothers Compton--Karl (M.I.T.), Arthur (Washington University) and Wilson (Washington State University).

Many of these colleges have "32" links with universities, notably in engineering. A student takes three years at a college, two at a University, emerges with a B.A. plus a B.S. About one-quarter of the colleges are also in American University's "Washington Semester" plan, which gives able political science majors one term in the nation's capital, where they watch politicians in action, and usually (80%) get stirred to go to graduate school.

Most smaller colleges now try to attract students from a wider geographic area, notably from the big Eastern cities and suburbs. Says Kalamazoo's Princeton-educated President Weimer K. Hicks: "The sooner people in the East lose their provincial outlook on college education, the sooner we can ease up the so-called admissions jam." Pittsburgh's Chatham College prides itself on nurturing diversity and "intelligent nonconformity" among students; President Edward D. Eddy Jr. suggests that a student candidate's having backed some "unpopular but worthwhile cause" is a good qualification for admission.

High Scenery. Many of the small colleges boast magnificent surroundings. Colorado is in the shadow of Pikes Peak. Washington State's Whitman (fine pre-med training) thrives near wheat fields and ski slopes. Other "unknown" colleges are in lively U.S. cities: New Orleans' Sophie Newcomb is the women's branch of Tulane University; and Washington. D.C.'s Trinity is a topflight Roman Catholic girls' school that emphasizes science and languages, including Russian and Chinese. New York City's Wagner College has a double feature: a hilltop rural campus on Staten Island with a sweeping view of passing ocean liners and easy access (by a 5-c- ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty) to the cultural riches of Manhattan.

President Hicks's Kalamazoo boasts everything from a fine tennis team to useful lab training at the nearby Upjohn Co.; the school ranks third nationally in percentage of science majors who go on to earn doctorates. Through a special trust fund, half its freshman class will spend a summer of study in Europe before they graduate.

Africans & Astronomers. Michigan's Hope College, long a school for students of Dutch origin, now has a summer branch in Vienna. Ohio's Heidelberg College sends 15 to 20 juniors each year to its namesake university in Germany. At Ohio's Western College for Women, launched originally as a "western" Mt. Holyoke College, students focus each year on a different area of the world, spend the summer touring it. Western also specializes in Afro-Asian students, currently has the first Sudanese woman to study in the U.S.

Some of these colleges have been quiet founts of no-nonsense education for decades. Suburban Atlanta's Agnes Scott turns out a high number of fine Ph.D. candidates and has an excellent astronomy department. Tennessee's quiet little University of the South patterns its 10,000-acre campus after Oxford, complete with gowns for top students, and publishes the oldest U.S. literary quarterly, the Sewanee Review. Several of these colleges also have much new money, e.g., North Carolina's Davidson (TIME, Dec. 21, 1959), a rising campus with a reputation for sending men to prestigious graduate schools (most famed student: Woodrow Wilson).

Learning & Burning. Kentucky's unique Berea College is designed specifically to serve poor students from the Southern Appalachians (90% of enrollment). Searching for talent amidst poverty, Berea charges no tuition (students earn their keep), is so successful of its kind that educators flock to it from underdeveloped countries in hopes of picking up ideas. Another bootstrap operation is Oklahoma City University, which is remodeling itself completely after M.I.T. (TIME, June 6). At Texas' Austin College, a hefty new Ford grant is aimed at building the school into a Southwestern Amherst or Swarthmore.

Virginia's lively Hollins College boasts one of the country's key teaching machine projects (and a rare statistics major for women). At Iowa's Easterner-beckoning Simpson College, all students take in a new "Vital Center" curriculum designed to ask questions and pose answers about Western and Oriental civilization. Ohio's strong little Hiram College, which sends 80% of its students to graduate schools, gives a student only three courses at a time, to encourage more intensive study. At Florida's Stetson University near Daytona Beach, where students can get learned and burned at once, able high school juniors get a summer of stiff training by teams of high school and college teachers, may then be accepted immediately at many colleges throughout the country.

Shooting for the Sky. Audacious tinkering is under way at Illinois' offbeat Shimer College, once a University of Chicago affiliate, which is stoutly carrying on the ideas of Chicago's onetime boss, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Shimer accepts bright youngsters as early as sophomore year in high school, lets them move through college at their own pace. They get a B.A. in three years, stay on a fourth year for deeper study before moving on to such graduate schools as Harvard and Chicago. This year, when the Educational Testing Service gave exams to college seniors at its 222 affiliates, Shimer College's bright seniors won first place in natural sciences and humanities, tied for first place in social sciences.

Even headier are the big dreams at Vermont's tiny Marlboro College, founded in 1946 on three old farms in the Green Mountains. "We don't fit any stereotype," says President Thomas Ragle, 32, who came to teach and became president instead. Ragle is looking for "the creative intellectual, who may or may not score high on college boards." Not even accredited yet. Marlboro makes every student take a two-day, 16-hour comprehensive exam covering all fields. Flunkers may try again, but must pass to graduate. Also required: a rigorous research project so independently pursued that a student might even go off to Europe for a year to finish it. In such matters Ragle is an experimenter off on his own, but he speaks for all 50 colleges when he says: "We feel the only excuse we have for existing is quality, and we're shooting for the sky."

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