Colleges Without Walls

With four children and no college degree, Richard Cardinal saw little chance of escaping from the Ford assembly line where he had started working in 1955. "I had always wanted to study," says the burly ex-union official, now 35, "but money problems and the job didn't allow me to do it."

Until recently, Cardinal might have taken a few night school or correspondence courses, but never earned a degree. Last fall he discovered that he could earn that degree from Empire State College, part of the State University of New York, without ever setting foot in a classroom. Now when he is not working on the assembly line in Albany, Cardinal combs through union archives, reads labor history and interviews co-workers--all part of his major in labor relations, a program that has been especially designed to fit both his interests and his work schedule.

More and more educators are coming to believe that a college education need not take place in a classroom or follow a prescribed curriculum. They are also finding that thousands of adults, as well as young people, are eager to study but cannot get to college. The solution: a college education without a college. The best known of such experimental programs opened last year: the University Without Walls (U.W.W.)--a joint effort by 20 colleges based at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio --and Empire State College in New York. Similar courses will start this fall at universities in California, Maryland, New Jersey and Texas.

All aim, as Empire State President James W. Hall says, "to step aside from the subtle tyrannies that have existed in education." Empire State, for example, has no campus, no classrooms, laboratories or libraries--just 400 students who pay up to $1,067 a year in tuition to be guided in their studies by advisers based in five cities. These advisers, known as "mentors," help each student to work out a program that can include independent study, tutorial conferences or formal courses on any of the New York State university system's 72 campuses.

By 1975 the college expects to have up to 7,000 students. Explains Vice President Arthur Chickering: "We are trying to find a way to make education more accessible and more flexible according to a student's strengths, weaknesses and aspirations."

Such an approach allows Empire State to enroll students like Jim Walsh, 24, who hates classrooms and is earning degree credits by working at an Indian archaeological dig near Saratoga; Steve Hasso, 17, who is studying literature, history and political science to supplement his senior year in high school; and Mary Ellen Musgrave, 28, who found nursing so intellectually unchallenging that she is now studying philosophy, art and music, and will receive her bachelor's degree next month. Perhaps more typical is Auto Worker Cardinal, who wants to "understand what it is that makes our lives miserable as workers," but also expects his degree to help him get a better job. He vows: "I'm going to get that B.A. It's my last shot."

Pioneer. Similarly individualized courses of study are offered to the 3,000 students--aged 17 to 76--enrolled in the University Without Walls, which has programs ranging in size from two dozen students at Bard College in New York to 130 at Antioch's campus in San Francisco. Although the schools set their own admission standards and tuition (from as low as $300 to as high as $3,000 a year), they all have the same major degree requirement: each student must present to a student-faculty review committee evidence of his expertise, which may be as conventional as a thesis on Hemingway or as unconventional as a dance recital. Since many students have been given credit for previous college work, the year-old U.W.W. will graduate its first students this month.

The pioneer in these experiments is Britain's Open University. Launched by the Labor government in 1969, Open University now has 35,000 housewives, truck drivers and even soldiers studying toward bachelor's degrees in various fields of science and the arts. It has no formal entrance requirements ("All we ask," says Dean Geoffrey Holister, "is that a student can read and write"), but teaching is rigorous. At a cost of about $200 per student, each course involves one week of summer school, 34 weeks of television and radio lectures, and large amounts of required reading and writing assignments, which must be mailed to tutors for grading.

Traditional British educators at first were shocked at the idea of anyone earning a degree "by watching the telly," but they have been mollified by Open University's maintenance of academic standards.

Of the 24,000 students who enrolled in the first year's course, about one-fifth dropped out, and another fifth decided not to attempt the final exams, which are just as difficult as those at Oxford or Cambridge.

But of those who did take the exams, 93% passed. Among them were David Munro, 35, a postal worker who pursued science studies "between putting two children to bed and having a quick pint," and Steelworker Colin O'Leary, 37, who jokes that after studying the philosophy of logic, "I can now win arguments at the pub."

One thing that attracts increasing numbers of U.S. educators to Open University is the fact that it is relatively cheap to operate: it costs about one-fourth as much as a conventional British university. Indeed, the new programs at California, Texas, Maryland and New Jersey universities will even import the same materials being used in England. Explains Rutgers Provost Kenneth Wheeler: "If we can use their texts and lectures and not have to develop our own, it would mean a savings of millions of dollars."

But other administrators, like Empire State President Hall, are wary of standardized materials that "assume that every student wants to do the same thing." Only by tailoring the study program to an individual's needs, he says, can an open university simultaneously "give greater enrichment to careers and greater relevance to liberal arts."

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