The Will to Succeed

The modern Horatio Alger is a penniless Negro who rises from the rags of a segregated Southern high school to the riches of Harvard. As in the classic story, he has a patron. It is the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, a counseling agency that finds poor Negroes with rich minds and then finds colleges and scholarships for them. In 15 years of scouring South and North, NSSFNS (which is commonly reduced to "Ness-feness" in speech) has successfully planted 9,000 Negroes in 350 mostly-white colleges, and last week it revealed its chief asset: the Negroes' own passionate desire to succeed.

To measure its methods, NSSFNS President Richard L. Plaut launched a survey of 1,278 recent proteges. The overall dropout rate turned out to be 33.4%--as against the national rate of 60%.* Of 509 willing to provide complete information, 1% made Phi Beta Kappa and 10% graduated with honors. Southerners topped the Northerners at high-standard campuses.

Behind the statistics are people such as Jo Ellen Flagg, 26, daughter of a domestic in Charleston, W. Va., who went to West Virginia Wesleyan ('58) on a family income of $1,090. She majored in library science, got a B average, earned a master's at Western Reserve, and is the science librarian of Oberlin College. Ragan A. Henry, 29, son of a Kentucky carpenter's helper, came from a family with an income of $3,000. He won $4,600 in scholarships at Harvard, graduated magna cum laude ('56), went on to Harvard Law ('61), is a Philadelphia lawyer.

Harold C. Haizlip, 28, son of a porter in Washington, D.C., went to work at the age of twelve to supplement a family income of $2,800. Amherst gave him a scholarship and he graduated cum laude ('57) with an honors thesis written in ancient Greek on "The Greek Concept of Eros." He got a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, earned his master's degree in teaching at Harvard in 1959. Married to a Wellesley girl, he is now working for a Ford Foundation project to help modernize Boston schools.

The survey was run by Psychologists Kenneth B. Clark (whose studies of segregation bolstered the 1954 Supreme Court school decision) and Lawrence Plotkin, who both teach at City College of New York. Their chief conclusion is that colleges ought to weigh entrance-exam scores less for Negroes because the tests "do not predict the college success of Negro students in the same way they do for whites."

In short, "motivational factors" are more important. "These students must complete college; to drop out means that they will fall back into the ranks of the nonspecialized labor force where their race ensures the permanence of low status. Thus the Negro students, aspiring to integration, overwhelmingly succeed in graduating despite the fact that they are less well prepared academically and financially."

*Main reasons: money, military service and (especially among girls) marriage. Harvard's dropout rate is 25%, Wisconsin's 46%, Indiana's 56%. Many eventually return or graduate elsewhere, but this still leaves the national net dropout rate at 40%.

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