S.R.O.

The big colleges, and the little colleges with big names, were getting the trade.

Last week, in most U.S. colleges, spring terms had just begun. Pitt was so crowded that classes had to be held on a day & night shift. At Ohio State, wives of faculty members helped teach. Texas Christian University set up geology labs in a gymnasium.

Wisconsin quartered 1,866 veterans in a powder plant 35 miles from the campus, 1,660 more at an Army airfield. Columbia established a "trailer campus," charging veterans for parking space but not for rent. At Rhode Island State, 28 Quonsets on Vet Row were jammed, eleven students to a hut. The president of Ohio's Marietta College took in boarders. Some hardy students at U.C.L.A. slept in all-night movies and parked cars.

Everywhere student families played house in gyms, attics and cellars (40% of the ex-G.I.s were married). Princeton broke a 200-year-old tradition, let students' wives live on the campus. Colgate admitted its first four coeds. Harvard was besieged by 325 veterans a day. Illinois, Ohio State and Purdue turned down out-of-state applicants. Rutgers wrestled with a freshman class larger than the three upper classes combined. Enrollment at Michigan (13,714) was the biggest in its 109-year history.

Why Not Yale? While the favored colleges grumbled over indigestion, lesser schools complained of malnutrition. The Association of American Colleges estimated that smaller colleges could absorb an extra 250,000 students. So far, 41% of all back-to-school G.I.s had packed into 38 schools, largely ignoring 712 other fully accredited colleges. In some cases the G.I. was only guilty of trying for the best--why go to Podunk College, when the Government will send you to Yale? But others had a better reason: they wanted training in trades or professions which small liberal arts colleges were not equipped to teach.

Viewers-with-alarm talked of the overcrowding as "the veteran problem," but it was more than that. Besides the normal influx from prep schools there were thousands of young war workers who had put aside schooling while there was big money to be made, and now wanted to catch up. So far, 300,000 ex-G.I.s were enrolled; by fall, educators expected at least 750,000.

Mostly they were a serious lot, impatient with spoon-fed schooling and such extracurricular attractions as hazing. Their grades averaged well above their fellow students. (At the University of Minnesota, only three of 6,000 ex-G.I.s were in scholastic trouble.)

The big problem was whether, with so many, they would get the schooling they were entitled to. Rochester University's able President Alan Valentine warned that if enrollments continue to shoot up, "the quality of our education will be pulled down."

Last week New York (which has no state university) decided to go into the business on a jerry-built, short-term basis. Governor Thomas E. Dewey summoned educators from the 85 New York universities and colleges. Said he: "Let's get them in this year even though you will have to sacrifice some of your standards." The educators agreed as "a last resort" to sponsor an emergency two-year college for 12,000 ex-G.I.s at Sampson Naval Base near Geneva. Six upstate colleges will help supply about 1,000 faculty members; the state will put up the cash ($3-to-$5 million). Proposed name: Dewey College.

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