College Steers Bored High School Students Along Early Course to Degree

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. —  Laura Sayre was 16 when she dropped out of high school for something less boring--college.

Now she credits Simon’s Rock of Bard College with saving her from the agony of two more years of high school.

“My parents’ friends said, ‘I’m sure you want to get away from here.’ That was not the case,” she says. “I was perfectly happy with my parents and my friends. I miss my big, flat Midwestern sky. There was just no school for me in Iowa City.”

Simon’s Rock, the nation’s only college primarily oriented toward restless but motivated high school-age students, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The school has graduated more than 1,000 students. It opened with 55 high school sophomores, all girls, and now averages 300 students, male and female, a year.

The college draws on a small group of dissatisfied students who drop out of high school for the challenges of college.

Fill ‘Interesting Niche’

“We occupy an interesting niche in American education,” says Provost U Ba Win. “In Wall Street terms, I guess you could say we’re niche players. In this country of 230 million people, we manage to find 130 people to come here every fall.”

The school is named after a stone that commands a sweeping view of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. The campus was once the 275-acre summer estate of Elizabeth Hall, former headmistress of prestigious Concord Academy.

The college houses undergraduates in grand 19th-Century “cottages” that once sheltered Hall’s ancestors. They attend classes in stark white chalets popular in the 1960s.

Hall says she founded Simon’s Rock after years of listening to alumnae complaints about the large, impersonal classes at many colleges.

The idea was not new. The late Robert M. Hutchins, while president of the University of Chicago, opened his school to teen-age students in the 1930s because he believed the last few years of high school were wasted on many of them. Several other colleges, such as LaGuardia Community College in Queens, N.Y., also admit groups of high school-age students.

Younger Students

But Simon’s Rock is the only college primarily for younger students. Some college-age students are admitted, but they are the minority in a school founded on the belief that younger students fare better when studying alongside their peers.

“The peer group is critical,” says Leon Botstein, president of Bard College of Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. “This group is dominated by the deep-seated insecurity of adolescence. We need to create a subculture that reinforces scientific curiosity for the whole group, not just the smarties.”

Botstein entered the so-called “early college” at the University of Chicago at age 16. What he called his “autobiographic affection for this type of system” and his admiration for the design of Simon’s Rock led Bard to acquire the college eight years ago when it was in deep financial trouble.

The richer college strengthened the curriculum of the poorer one with writing and logic workshops for freshmen and the study of classic texts for all undergraduates.

Botstein says Simon’s Rock proves that “better-than-average students can at a much earlier age be engaged in serious academic enterprise as opposed to wasting their time getting deluged by trivia and the barbarism of peer values at conventional high schools.”

Recruiting Methods

Most students enter the college after their sophomore or junior year in high school. Some hear about the school through word of mouth. Others learn of it through college recruiters and the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J. The service sells lists of high school students who score well on its scholastic aptitude tests and indicate they want information on colleges.

But the service is costly and principals don’t like to lose their best students too early, says Bradford College President Arthur Levine, who did a study of Simon’s Rock for the Carnegie Foundation five years ago and called it one of the 25 most important innovations in the history of American education.

About 60% of Simon’s Rock students come from public schools in the Northeast, and their combined scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test average 1150 to 1200. “These kids are not gifted,” Botstein says. “They’re normal American college-bound men and women.”

Dean of Academic Affairs Bernard Rogers says some students come to the college with mediocre high school grades. “We think that’s because they were bored. There’s probably one student in every school in the country that needs this place.”

But the school does not want youngsters with behavior problems and tries to interview each prospective student to weed out those who are emotionally troubled. The school is looking for students who need a bigger challenge at a time when, according to educators at Simon’s Rock, they are most receptive to stimulating ideas.

Rules for Freshmen

Because of their tender age, freshmen observe more rules than those at other colleges. They live in single-sex dormitories with strict visiting hours. All classes are limited to 15 students and freshmen are watched closely by teachers, who meet with them every week to ensure that they are on the right track academically and emotionally.

Students may earn an associate degree in two years and go on to other colleges or stay to earn their bachelor’s degree.

A few, like Leslie Sander of Jeffersonville, Vt., leave after two years, discover that they have made a mistake and return. The 19-year-old college senior transferred to Bryn Mawr College for a semester in her junior year before returning to Simon’s Rock.

“I liked Bryn Mawr, but my connections to Simon’s Rock were pretty strong,” Sander says. “I wasn’t getting much there I couldn’t get here, other than the name.”

Teachers’ Rewards

Teachers also say they are committed to the school, despite their low salaries and heavy course loads, because of the rewards of working closely with students. But the cost of keeping the small teacher-to-student ratio is great and the school’s endowment is practically nil.

“We have no wealthy constituency,” Hall says. “A lot of our alumni came to us on financial aid and most of them are still struggling to make it in their careers.”

The school gets by with state and federal grants and tuition of $12,000 yearly while managing to give more than half the students financial aid averaging almost $5,000 each, the provost says.

After two decades of struggle, the little college is breaking even and probably will survive as a living critique of secondary education, Rogers says.

“It says students are capable of doing more than we let them do.”