Easy Payments

Seven U.S. colleges this year join 93 private schools in selling education on the installment plan. Devised by a grey-haired businessman, Rudolf Neuberger, the plan may enable many a parent, hard hit by soaring income taxes in World War II, to send his children to a good school. It may also save many a school from the financial disasters which have overtaken Britain's schools since war began (TIME, April 28).

Tuition Plan, Inc. is patterned after commercial installment systems. A parent signs a contract with a school, which sells the contract to the agency, and in return receives its full tuition price at the beginning of each term. Tuition Plan sends the parent a monthly bill (adding 4% for its services), collects the money in eight installments. Chief difference between Tuition Plan and an automobile credit company: if the customer fails to pay, the credit company can repossess his car, but Tuition Plan cannot foreclose on the child.

Tuition Plan does no dunning. If a parent fails to pay in a reasonable time, the school is obligated to buy back the contract and then collect as best it can. But among several thousand contracts so far written, Tuition Plan has never had one that failed to pay out.

In the last decade, many a parent with reduced income has asked a school to reduce its published rates. So keen is the competition among schools for students, to keep enrollments up to par, that many headmasters oblige--sometimes by granting "scholarships" which are actually no more than cut-rate prices. Rudolf Neuberger's system makes it possible for headmasters to offer an easy-payment plan without cutting tuition fees.

Blue-eyed, moon-faced Rudolf Neuberger got his idea while he was working for Atlas Powder Co. He kept hearing his friends groan over the big checks ($500 to $700) they had to send off each term to board their children in prep schools. To Mr. Neuberger, a merchandising expert, this looked like a problem business methods could solve. When he first circularized schools in 1938, he got just one client: Manlius School in New York State. Manlius sent Tuition Plan 20 contracts within ten days. The 100-odd institutions which now use the Plan include such prep schools as Ashley Hall in Charleston, S.C., Friends' Select (Quaker) School in Philadelphia, Riverdale Country School in New York, St. John's Military Academy in Delafield, Wis.

When his list of clients began to outgrow the Plan's financial backing last year, Businessman Neuberger reorganized, took second place as vice president, got a businesswoman for president: elderly, pleasant Mrs. Florence McConnell Rogers, Minnesota-born, who used to be an executive assistant to the president of the Bank of the Manhattan Co. No altruistic institution, Tuition Plan pays its way, expects before long to give its small list of stockholders some profit. It hopes to make a bigger dent in colleges next year. Biggest clients thus far: Pennsylvania's Haverford, New York's Hobart.

New York City banned two textbooks on German literature which were being used in its public schools. Reason: somebody woke up to the fact that the author, Dr. Otto ("O.K.") Koischwitz, until two years ago in the city's Hunter College, now broadcasts Nazi propaganda from Germany.

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