Self-Made College

The campus is two floors of an old federal office building in downtown Manhattan. Most of the 142 students are poor black or Puerto Rican women with children. All are over 21, and some are in their 50s. Only half finished high school; half are on welfare when they matriculate. Few U.S. colleges would accept or could afford such students. Yet the tuition-free College for Human Services pays them $2.10 an hour to swallow a massive dose of social sciences and earn a two-year Associate in Arts degree that is recognized anywhere in the country. The result may well be the most refreshing experiment in U.S. higher education.

C.H.S. is a testament to the vision and tenacity of Audrey Cohen, the young wife of a well-to-do Manhattan tax lawyer. A former CORE worker and social-studies teacher, Mrs. Cohen has long felt that thousands of inner-city adults have the untapped talent to fill skilled jobs in the nation's undermanned human-service agencies. Unfortunately, such people commonly lack the diplomas and degrees that are now mandatory for the very jobs that they could do best. In a nation that stresses formal education as salvation, bright dropouts are increasingly stymied by the paper barriers of what critics ironically call the "credential society."

In 1964, Mrs. Cohen set out to breach those barriers. With funds from foundations, the Office of Economic Opportunity and the U.S. Department of Labor, she established the privately run Women's Talent Corps, which trained poor women for paraprofessional jobs in New York City's public schools, hospitals, day-care centers and legal-aid agencies. The Talent Corps eventually became the two-year College for Human Services, which now has more than 650 applicants. High school diplomas are not required for admission. Instead, C.H.S. tests applicants for math and reading ability--and accepts only those who show exceptional motivation.

Sophomore over 50. The chief feature of C.H.S. is a work-study program that heightens the students' "need to learn." Taught by 14 former college teachers and social-service experts, they devote two days a week to classes combining psychology, sociology, economics and literature. The freshman curriculum includes remedial reading and math along with Rousseau's The Social Contract and Orwell's Animal Farm. Sophomores study theories of teaching, ghetto psychology, urban economics and black literature. Three days a week, accompanied by their teachers, the students take their theory back to the neighborhoods by working as teacher assistants, community liaison trainees and the like. Of last year's 100 freshmen, only 16 dropped out, mostly for lack of adequate day care for their children. Typical of those determined to graduate is Evalyn Shaw, a black woman who dropped out of school after the ninth grade and is now over 50. As a C.H.S. sophomore, Mrs. Shaw helps spur high school students toward college and personally hopes to become "the Grandma Moses of education."

Of the program's 370 graduates to date, 342 are holding down steady jobs (some devised by C.H.S. itself) in various public agencies, and many have proved more adept at dispensing social services than the professionals. "The women feel more at home talking with me," says Josephine Garcia, who now explains contraception, often in Spanish, to indigent maternity patients. Mrs. Garcia, separated from her husband, lives in a cramped apartment with her four children. As she puts it, her clients "can see I'm one of them."

Backyard Problems. Despite successes, Audrey Cohen's graduates were at first blocked by the very degree barrier that she set out to surmount. Often they advanced a rung or two in their new jobs and then stalled. The reason, along with professional jealousy, was that C.H.S. had no power to grant formal degrees. So two years ago Mrs. Cohen petitioned the New York State Board of Regents for a charter permitting her school to issue the same Associate in Arts degree available at the state's community colleges. "Everybody is so busy trying to mimic Harvard," she contended, "that they have forgotten the problems in their own backyards. What we are trying to create is a means of harnessing education to the needs of the community, much as the land-grant schools did for the farmer."

In a rare and significant move, which may encourage similar efforts across the country, the New York regents last month agreed with Mrs. Cohen and granted her school a five-year provisional charter. The regents acted on the basis of a glowing report from their three-man evaluation committee. Asked to determine whether the school matched orthodox junior colleges in academic quality, the committee reported that "the appropriate question" might be whether any junior-college program could in fact match Mrs. Cohen's.

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