The Plight of the Small College

by W. ALLEN WALLIS

DEAR TED:
To clarify what I was saying the other night, let me repeat that I do not expect small colleges to disappear like the little red schoolhouse. I simply expect them to disappear from the top quality brackets. Over the past century some of the very best undergraduate education available in the country has been at the small liberal arts colleges. My point is that in the future one will not look to a small independent college for a first-rate education, but rather to a college which is an integral part of a strong university.
The best institutions are dealing with a different kind of student today. In the first place, with so many more candidates applying, it has been possible for those colleges which control the growth of their enrollments to specialize in students of high quality. The number of scholarships has noticeably increased with our prosperity, and as a result, not nearly so many students have to confine themselves to institutions near their homes.
Second, the quality of high school graduates has greatly improved as a result of impressive improvement in high school education over the past decade. Today, far more high school graduates come from families with collegiate backgrounds; as children they have been exposed in some degree to books, magazines, the arts, and reasonable conversation. More parents are aware of the importance of education to practical success. All in all, the incoming students are more highly selected, they come better prepared, and they are more serious about the academic side of college.
The simplest expedient would seem to be the upgrading of what goes on in the best colleges — doing in the freshman year, say, what was formerly done in the junior year, in the sophomore year what was formerly done in the senior year, and so forth. If you look at it this way, you see at once that the junior and senior years would call for what was formerly graduate work, not covered in the liberal arts college.
But in fact, the situation is more complicated than that. When you deal with a top group, you have more diversity within the group than when you deal with a mediocre group. Consider how much more variable the tallest 10 percent of men are than the middle 10 percent. The tallest 10 percent range over a span of more than six inches, from just under six feet to six feet six inches and more. The middle 10 percent, in contrast, cover a span of only about three quarters of an inch, centered at about five feet eight. In fitting trousers, a single length could serve the whole 10 percent of average men quite satisfactorily, but no one length would fit all the upper 10 percent. Similarly with intellectual traits: a great deal of custom tailoring is necessary in educating the top 10 percent.
The result of all these trends is that every year when the new freshmen appear, a number of them turn out to be qualified for work at the graduate level in at least one subject. By the time they get to be seniors, a majority are prepared, in at least one subject, for work at the graduate level.
I am not talking about geniuses or quiz kids; just bright, normal young adults. The term “wellrounded" comes to mind when you get to know them personally, but in fact it is an inept description because so many of them have some exceptional aptitude, interest, or knowledge projecting way beyond the level of their other personal qualities.
To exemplify the kind of student I am talking about, here are a few case histories selected from records of our College of Arts and Science:
Theodore F. graduated from Medwood High in Brooklyn in 1964. He ranked twelfth in a class of twelve hundred, and was one of seventy outstanding students admitted to the math-science program at Medwood. He elected both biology and chemistry in his sophomore year and physics as a junior. In his senior year he took advanced placement courses in chemistry, mathematics, and European history. During the summer of his junior year he was among twenty-eight outstanding high school students chosen from a group of five hundred applicants for a nine-week laboratory apprenticeship at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, where he worked on a study of the heritability of early postnatal growth rates in progeny of irradiated mice.
In his college boards Ted ranked in the 99th percentile in both verbal and math tests. Yet — and here is a very important point — Ted ranked only average, high average, and low average respectively, in speed reading, the Iowa English Placement Test, and the Modern Language Aptitude Test. Thus, Ted is not a one-in-a-million genius. He’s a bright, imaginative young man with a well-organized mind, a natural grasp of mathematics, and an insatiable curiosity in certain science fields, who had had some excellent advanced education before he came to college. This fall, as he begins his sophomore year at the University of Rochester, he is ready to work at the graduate level in his major area of interest. Ted is no new phenomenon on the American academic scene. We have had similarly equipped students coming to us for several years, though they are now arriving in such rapidly increasing numbers as to be almost typical.
Three years ago Lewis K. graduated from Staten Island’s Curtis High. While he was in high school, he attended the Caravan of Chemistry at Yale and the atomic exhibit and symposium at Chicago. He worked on a chemistry project for the Westinghouse Talent Search and made weather forecasts with homemade equipment that duplicated the Weather Bureau forecasts, except for one occasion when it turned out that Lewis’ forecast was right and the Weather Bureau’s was wrong. As a senior at Rochester this year, Lewis will be taking at least two courses at the graduate level, and at the same time making an interesting transition, from a major in chemistry to one in political science.
Eric H. audited a course in chemistry at the University of Colorado in 1960 while still in high school. In the summer of 1961, he completed the summer science-training program in geology and chemistry at the Colorado School of Mines under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. Eric is a senior this year, and his program is mainly at the graduate level.
Nina T., a senior, is a history honors major. She graduated fifty-first in her class of one hundred and thirty-six from Hunter College High School in New York City, where she was a well-liked participant in many student activities. Nina has a fine voice and has had special training in dance, guitar, piano, and art. She has a secure multilingual background in English, French, and Russian, speaks German without an accent, and has studied Greek and Latin. As a junior she did excellent work in a graduate course in Russian religious history, and as a senior this year is taking several other graduate courses.
What of the faculty who must cope with such students? No longer is it sufficient for a faculty member to prepare carefully within carefully defined boundaries. In his classes he must be prepared for questions ranging over many topics, and discussion penetrating deeply into some of them. He will have to cope with term papers that sometimes are equivalent to a master’s thesis. He must be able to inspire students to investigate for themselves, and he must provide leadership to and criticism of their investigatory efforts. In short, since so many students are prepared for work at the graduate level, the faculty must be prepared to offer commensurate instruction. This means getting a faculty of genuine graduate caliber, with interests, skills, and accomplishments in research and scholarship and with pedagogical ability, not just in making material interesting, but in making the processes of obtaining knowledge a real challenge.
Such a faculty cannot be obtained unless it will have a body of graduate students to work with; ample time and resources for its own research, scholarship, and study; and faculty colleagues with related interests — unless, in other words, it is part of a true university.
Undergraduate college education used to represent pretty much the pinnacle of formal education. Nowadays, holders of bachelors degrees are as common as high school graduates were at the end of World War I. Ph.D.’s are as common as college graduates were at the turn of the century. This great increase in graduate work results partly from the great increase in income, so that people can use their undergraduate college years for general education and postpone professional preparation. It also results from the much greater earning power produced by graduate work, so that even if students were not better able to afford it, they would still find it more worthwhile than they did earlier.
Colleges which confine their efforts to undergraduates will find themselves relegated, by the end of this century, to the position occupied today by the good preparatory schools. In fact, they will not be in as good a position, for unlike first-rate preparatory schools today, they will not get the best students. The best students will go to universities.
The history of the University of Rochester is relevant in the light of these trends. Although we were called a university from the time we were organized in 1849, we were, in fact, only an undergraduate liberal arts college until 1918. Then we had the charter amended to allow us to undertake other activities. In 1921, classes started in our Eastman School of Music, and in 1925 in our School of Medicine and Dentistry. It was not until the late thirties, however, that doctoral work began to be taken seriously in the College of Arts and Science. In the late thirties, first-class doctoral programs were started in physics under Lee DuBridge, in chemistry under Albert Noyes, in psychology under Leonard Carmichael, in history under Dexter Perkins, in biology under Curt Stern, and in one or two other fields. But beginning in 1951, when my predecessor, C. W. de Kiewiet, took office, major efforts were made to develop doctoral programs and research of high quality in every department of the College of Arts and Science, and we also moved business, education, and engineering into separate colleges.
Rochester had two unusual factors that have made for success in this effort:
First, we inherited a large endowment, mostly from George Eastman, and so we had important funds of our own to do the job with. We committed them primarily to people and programs — to bringing in high quality faculty, which of course meant raising faculty salaries (we are now among the top dozen institutions in the country in faculty salaries), and to introducing new or improved curricula. Very little of our money was put into buildings. We did a lot of building, but mostly by borrowing for dormitories, dining halls, and other facilities which are self-supporting, by government contracts, by funds from foundations, by capital grants from corporations, and by gifts from individual donors for special buildings.
And second, the medical school was one of the great ones in the world, and this meant that we had close at hand a body of people interested in the university who were qualified to evaluate possible faculty appointments and encourage top people to come to Rochester — the recruiting of DuBridge, Noyes, Carmichael, Stern, and others involved important assistance from members of the medical school faculty. This accounts for beginning our graduate developments in the sciences, where the medical school had the best grounding. That the humanities, which had been the traditional point of focus in the College of Arts and Science at Rochester, did not benefit in the same way from the music school or from the Memorial Art Gallery, can be explained in large part, I suspect, by geography: the medical school adjoins the main campus, whereas the music school and art gallery are ten or fifteen minutes away. Only in the past decade have the humanities and the social sciences been reinvigorated, and this was greatly aided by the very scientists who earlier had been recruited with the help of medical faculty.
Thus, hindsight suggests that our development since 1918 has been characterized by a considerable measure of foresight. And this brings me back to my opening assertion that the liberal arts colleges which today provide much of our best undergraduate education will not do so in the future.
I really expect that the best small colleges will evolve in much the same way that Rochester already has. This, indeed, is not so much an expectation of what they will do as an observation of what they are in fact doing. My information is spotty and casual, but I have heard of movements — not all recent, by any means — in the direction I have indicated: at Reed, at Oberlin, at Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts cooperatively, at Lawrence, at Dartmouth, at Williams, at Swarthmore, at Bryn Mawr, at Haverford, at the Claremont Colleges cooperatively, and elsewhere. It would be interesting and enlightening to make a survey of trends in liberal arts colleges, to see how generally and how consciously they are recognizing and adjusting to the long-run implications of what we were discussing.
Sincerely yours,
ALLEN WALLIS