As College Starts, There Go the Stop-Outs

The question used to be "Where are you going to college?" Now it is "Are you going?"

Pamela Batchelor, a June high school graduate in suburban Mountain Lakes, N.J., speaks for a growing number of U.S. students. Pam will spend the fall backpacking in Europe. As U.S. colleges open this autumn with a record enrollment of more than 8,000,000, several thousand young people with the brains to get in and the money for tuition will be missing. They are rebelling at the very idea of attending college at all--at least, as they see it, until they can figure out what the courses have to do with their own feelings and aims. Even among the traditionally college-oriented graduates of leading prep schools, a new survey shows that 6% decided not to go on to college in 1970, compared with 4.5% the year before. The disenchantment affects students already in college as well; an estimated 500,000 will leave voluntarily by year's end.

The trend is often shocking to parents and discomfiting to colleges. But a large, though not yet measurable number of the students who choose to leave will eventually come back, if they follow past patterns. In the words of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, they "stop out"--that is, they drop out of the college scene temporarily to gain experience.

What Was Relevant. One such stop-out is Hillary Emmer, 21. After two years as a listless biology student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Hillary announced that she was quitting school to "find out what is happening in the world." She zigzagged among half a dozen jobs, made herself an expert on local rent law and won a suit against her landlord. Then she took her $500 court award and hitchhiked across the country. This fall, she finally returned to Buffalo, switched her major from biology to community education, and turned on an enthusiasm she had never shown before. "I'm taking courses I believe in now," she says. "I found what was relevant to the world and relevant to me."

Some high school students, however brilliant, have always been emotionally unready for college; others leave because of illness, temporary lack of money or marriage. Still others have been so busy getting good marks in high school to win admission to college in the first place that they did not sufficiently think through what they intended to do once they got there. The trend of stopping out is growing, however, partly because the draft law now gives young men with high lottery numbers a new freedom. Beyond the counterculture's distaste for authority and material success, students--and for that matter, adults--are questioning the value of degrees at a time of high unemployment and scarcity of jobs for last June's graduates.

Although many students who take a break from college embark on seemingly endless meandering, many others take on jobs that run heavily to social work, part-time teaching and labor organizing. For instance, Hamilton Fish III, who on the record of his name alone should become a U.S. Congressman (he would be the fifth to do so), is now a Harvard stop-out, working on a campaign to register student voters on campus.

Not too many years ago, colleges frowned on peripatetic students. Now many administrations are beginning to give them formal encouragement. Increasing numbers of colleges advertise what they did informally for years--allow successful applicants to delay their entry for a year. The colleges assure the students--and their worried parents --that they will have places the following fall.

Disenchanted Hitchhiker. Wisconsin's Beloit College is thoughtfully offering its delaying freshmen a bit more: counseling on everything from personal problems to finding jobs. From the University of Kansas to Yale, undergraduates find it easy to get leaves of absence for up to two years; at Harvard last year, one out of every 18 students was on leave. Stanford's sympathetic advisers often work out projects in which students get academic credit for analyzing the nonacademic jobs they take.

Not every voluntary dropout comes back, of course. Roger Klotz, 21, who left Allegheny College after his sophomore year, became disenchanted on a cross-country hitchhike, decided that "the average guy can get his liberal arts education by reading in his spare time while he's working." He was hired by a hardware chain (after agreeing to stay with the firm for five years). Other dropouts drop in to part-time jobs and the communal-living arrangements that are now a permanent outgrowth of the counterculture.

Ticket to Ride. Nor do all those who return to college do so thirsty for higher learning. San Jose State's Jim Savstrom, who begins his final year this week, is getting his degree because, for a would-be teacher, it is a "ticket to ride, and I want to ride in the best possible way without welfare."

Clearly, leaving college can turn into a purposeless drift through trivial jobs and futile distractions. The specter of a dropout's destroying himself on heroin haunts many a parent (though the prevalence of drugs on campus makes life in academe less reassuring than it used to be).

Still, many stop-outs do better academically than their less-seasoned classmates, if only because they are a year older. One Illinois State psychology major, Doug Poag, dropped out to work on a prison-reform project. He has now joined the Bloomington, Ill., police force and started moonlighting at the university to prepare himself for law school. Students who stop out and return to class "are in school because they want to be, not because their daddy wants a doctor in the family," says Ward Dennis, associate dean of Columbia's School of General Studies. As Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie has pointed out, while school can be a preparation for life, life is a preparation for school.

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