Company-to-Campus

Except for the neat sign that says "Northrop Institute of Technology," the pale green buildings look like any factory in bustling (aerospace) Inglewood, adjoining Los Angeles. This is fitting, for N.I.T. is the only U.S. campus spawned by an industrial corporation as an in-plant cram school and then successfully converted to a much respected nonprofit college, whose graduates now number 9,000.

N.I.T. was fathered by James L. Mc-Kinley in 1942 to train production engineers for Northrop Aircraft's wartime assembly lines. By war's end, the school had proved so successful that Northrop turned it into a subsidiary company with the sole function of educating technicians for the entire aircraft industry. By 1947, the two-year school was rolling in subsidized G.I. Bill students. McKinley, sensing an opportunity to make the school into a junior Caltech, bought it from Northrop and turned it by 1960 into a tax-exempt institution valued at $800,000.

Loyal & Dependable. Today, Board Chairman McKinley and President Herbert W. Hartley run a school jammed to capacity with 1,700 students (one of them a girl). More than 75% are non-Californians, drawn from the 49 other states and 40 foreign countries. Some aim for a two-year technological diploma, but nearly all end up working for a full B.S. degree in engineering. Four-fifths finish in three years, getting along on vacations of four weeks a year. Says McKinley: "We teach these boys what it is to do eight hours of work, to be loyal to an employer and to be dependable."

N.I.T. is proud of its "salvage'' work with able youngsters who had given up higher education. Taking a second look, N.I.T. admits and reforms the promising. It rides them hard, and those who respond get immediate jobs in the booming aerospace industry at starting salaries of $600 to $700 a month. Some companies are so avid for N.I.T.'s products that they try to hire entire graduating classes.

Zip & Drive. All this "enlarging of horizons" impressed Caltech's Dean of Freshmen Foster Strong, when he headed the committee that approved accreditation of N.I.T. as a four-year degree-granting school in 1958. The geographical spread of N.I.T. students. Strong discovered, "was even better than Caltech's."The dedicated faculty, one examiner recalls, "had zip and drive."

Last week N.I.T. paused Friday night for one of its four-a-year commencements, bidding goodbye to 91 more holders of its hard-won degrees and diplomas, and prepared to open early Monday morning with 350 freshmen. At this rate, the school is fast running out of space, but already it owns a new 126-acre site in the San Fernando Valley. By 1965, it expects to complete its company-to-campus transformation by moving out to a new plant worth $18 million.

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