Education: Those Hot Colleges on the Climb

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Twenty years ago, it was a patch of forest outside Olympia, Wash. Today it is the site of Evergreen State College, a newly thriving liberal arts institution that last year was mentioned in a U.S. News & World Report survey of university and college presidents as one of the nation's better schools. Evergreen is one of a set of ambitious schools that in the past half a dozen years have emerged from academe's boondocks or thereabouts to reach for national recognition. All the institutions in the sampler below, along with a growing corps of like-minded schools, have risen under the hands of dynamic presidents. Each offers a special learning opportunity, some at bargain rates, to high school seniors hoping in this climactic month of the admissions season to get accepted by a decent college they can afford.

EVERGREEN. On opening day in September 1971, the library stood only half built, its books stored in a brewery. "We didn't have any buildings or dorms," recalls Physics Teacher Byron Youtz. Some classes met in local churches, and one convened on a lakeshore. Faculty members had no promise of tenure, and the curriculum consisted--as it still does--of Socratic seminars, Great Books courses and the like. Instead of grades, students got written evaluations, and still do. The original student body of 1,000 included a fair number of hippie types, to the dismay of the down-home state legislature, which showed a recurring tendency to try to cut off funds. But Evergreen hung on.

In 1985 Joseph Olander became president, seemingly an odd choice to continue building a college that had been under fire. A high school dropout and former street brawler, Olander taught himself to read from repair manuals and science fiction at a U.S. Air Force station on Canada's Baffin Island. Suddenly enchanted with education, he says, "I simply left the world of being a hoodlum" and worked his way through a number of degrees to a vice presidency at the University of Texas, El Paso; there he earned a dual reputation as an innovative manager and cheerful nut who liked to dress up as Darth Vader. At Evergreen, in addition to making appearances as the Pink Panther and the Easter Bunny, Olander has chopped some administrative positions and taken hold of a budget that, while hardly lavish ($7 million), amounts to a vote of confidence from once skeptical lawmakers. The faculty stands behind him and supports the no-tenure system.

Most pleased of all seem to be the students, now nearly 2,800 strong and mature (average age: 24). "They don't just teach you things," says Junior Michael Tobin, 31. "They teach you how to learn." Tuition for 1986-87: $1,212 for an in-state student, $4,206 for out-of-staters--not bad when total costs for some colleges have topped $15,000.

TRINITY. "I don't see anything wrong with academic elitism at all," says Ronald Calgaard, president of Trinity University in San Antonio. Five years ago, it was just another pretty good liberal arts school with 3,269 students and a $127.5 million endowment. Then Calgaard, who had arrived two years earlier from the University of Kansas, got going to make Trinity "the Amherst of the Southwest." He pushed the endowment close to $200 million and made no secret of what he would do with it. "We buy faculty," he says.