Education: Town-Gown Triumph

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Like ants with headlights, the cars turn off Sunset and Wilshire and pour into the University of California at Los Angeles, their drivers stoically paying the 50¢ automobile admission fee that U.C.L.A. charges to discourage overcrowding the 411-acre campus with cars. Out of the cars stream 9,500 night students, who head across the campus for courses that range from modern Armenian to thermal management of spacecraft. Along with the students come some 300,000 culture-minded visitors a year to such events as a film series on the supernatural, or a superb new production of Measure for Measure (TIME, Jan. 26). Thousands of extension students last week jammed registration offices to sign up for the spring semester.

U.C.L.A. is the showpiece and home base of the biggest adult higher education program in the U.S. It is run by the seven-campus University of California, which last year enrolled 150,000 extension students, more than one-fourth of all extension students on U.S. public campuses. The part-timers' course hours were the equivalent of those of a fulltime campus with 12,000 students. The entire operation costs $8,000,000. of which the state pays only 9%. Tuition and ticket sales cover the rest.

"Learn or Perish." Cal's effort goes far beyond the old image of university extension programs, which had their beginnings in agronomy courses for farmers and evening classes for teachers. About 80% of Cal's extension students—who are mostly married, mostly men, and who average 32 years of age—have attended college: 60% have bachelor degrees; 10% have graduate degrees. They include, as one astonishing example, two out of every three California lawyers. The big motive is to keep up. "It's no longer possible for the educational process to stop," says Dean Paul Sheats, Cal's statewide extension boss, "You have to learn or perish."

U.C.L.A. runs its extension courses from its main Westwood campus, its downtown Los Angeles branch, and 50 other locations in public schools, private houses and business offices. One summer course for doctors this year will include a field trip to Japan to study the side effects of oral contraceptives. An annual management seminar draws many executives from Boston's electronics complex.

Intellectual Burpee's. Published three times a year, the extension catalogue of more than 1,000 courses and seminars is a sort of intellectual Burpee's. Poring over this document, Angelenos can find anything from mortuary science, avant-garde French theater and "Values of Contemporary Man," to applied combinatorial mathematics taught by George (One, Two, Three . . . Infinity) Gamow and "Flights of Reality" as charted by Novelist Erskine Caldwell. The catalogue has revolutionized cocktail chatter from Bel Air to Beverly Hills.