Colleges: The School with Four Parents

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Tucked away in western Massachusetts are four of the better U.S. col leges: Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst and the University of Massachusetts. They have increasingly clung together and shared services in an attempt to raise quality while holding down costs. Last week, pursuing the same goal, they announced that they would create a fifth partner, Hampshire College, to rise on 300 acres of open country, roughly five miles from each of the others.

The aim of the coeducational college, scheduled to open with 250 freshmen in 1969, is to demonstrate that a new school can be small, good and low in cost by drawing upon the faculty, library and various central services of its well-established neighbors. The presidents of the four parent schools will be the trustees of Hampshire, which will resist such frills as intercollegiate athletics, fraternities and off-beat courses. Although the actual cost of its initial plant is still uncertain, Hampshire's start is assured by a $6,000,000 pledge from Harold F. Johnson, 69, a retired international lawyer who was president of Amherst's student council in 1918. While the school hopes to keep operating costs low, thus making a big endowment unnecessary, students will hardly feel the difference. Tuition and board will be about $3,000 a year—roughly equal to what most of the parent schools expect to be charging four years from now.