Summer Cum Velocitate

How can parents cope with the rising cost of college? Answer: raise a boy like Thomas Lagos, who has just saved his family thousands of dollars by breezing through Ohio's Wittenberg University in a single year. A Wittenberg faculty member said, "It's phenomenal, we've never seen anything like it here." Says his awed father, a Greek immigrant farmer: "Whatever Tommy do, he like to do fast."

No prodigy, Tom is a prodigious toiler who started taking college courses while still at Shawnee High School in Springfield, Ohio, trained himself to read 750 words a minute, and arrived at Wittenberg last fall having already earned 15 1/2 of the 36 credits needed for graduation. During his combined freshman-senior year, Tom earned twelve more credit hours by taking exams in courses that he did not even attend, finished the remaining 8 1/2 credits by the old-fashioned method of going to classes. Last week he graduated summa cum laude from Wittenberg with a straight-A average. "This way of going to college has all sorts of advantages," he says, "not the least of which is that I've got three more years of life to play with."

Tom is now headed for the University of Michigan law school on a full tuition scholarship, having rejected similar offers from three other top law schools--Duke, Chicago and Harvard. He hopes to become a lawyer (and future politician) as fast as he became a college graduate. For one thing, he has a family speed record to defend. Next fall his younger brother James will enter Wittenberg--with 20 out of the required 36 credits. If he maintains Tom's pace, James will also graduate in one year, but at the age of 18, compared with Tom's 19.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.