The Flunking of "Drop-out U."

President Millard Roberts of Iowa's Parsons College (TIME, Aug. 29, 1960) has plenty of ideas about education--some good, some bad. He believes that teachers should be well-paid, that even students with poor high school records should have a chance at higher education, and that colleges should pay their own way.

Since taking over in 1955 as president of Parsons, once a financially starved Presbyterian school, Roberts has methodically carried out his program for success. He increased Parsons' enrollment from 212 to 4,900, and upped student fees from $1,030 a year to $1,160 a trimester. Roberts has been able to erect $20 million worth of buildings on campus and push the average faculty pay from about $3,000 a year to more than $15,000--third highest in the nation. This year, while almost every school in the nation is running bigger deficits than ever, Parsons recently reported a neat annual profit of nearly $2,000,000.

Most U.S. educators have long looked with suspicion on Roberts' fiscal-minded approach to running a college, and last week the North Central Associ ation of Colleges and Secondary Schools voted to revoke Parsons' accreditation. The association did not explain its reasons, but other investigators have unearthed evidence suggesting that academic quality is not Parsons' primary goal. A surprising proportion of its students are either transfers or dropouts from other schools, and the colloquial campus name for Parsons is "Dropout U." Although well-paid, many Parsons professors must handle up to 20 class hours a week, and the teacher-student ratio is 1 to 20, compared with 1 to 6 at Harvard, 1 to 9 at Iowa. The association considers the minimum standard for a college library to be 255,000 volumes. Parsons' library has 82,000.

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