Students: Success on the Oval Campus

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Ernest Dahlman Jr. has rare scholarly attributes: a tenacious memory, a sense of judgment, a knack for making fast decisions, a willingness to study hard, and a near-perfect attendance record.

So Dahlman, 21, dropped out of New York City's Wagner College this fall and began to devote full time to the pari-mutuel teaching machines on the oval campus of Yonkers Raceway. His discriminating bets on the trotters soon put him $15,000 ahead, surely enough to make him an honor student among dropouts. Then, fortnight ago, he broke the record at Yonkers U., picking twin-double winners two nights in succession and walking off with $176,482.20 in prize money (half the lifetime earnings of the average college graduate).

Dahlman, a former economics major, at once got a lesson in Government tax policies, which will leave him with only about $42,000. But at the same time, he has neatly solved the commonest problem of the dropout: unemployment.

Last week he became a professional twin-double handicapper for the New York Post. Dahlman picked one set of winners (out of four races) on his first day, which among the more scholarly students of racing psychology earns him a very respectable B.