University of Virginia Library

colloquium

summer program
spurs learning

by william elwood

ed.

Some one third of the men and
women in Virginia cannot begin to afford
college; for another third college strains
their resources and they need some casing
of the pressure. Virginia is not unique -
it is about the same all over the nation.
And the crunch is on. An arithmetically,
or even geometrically, progressing technology
producing social and economic
mobility has made many of us foreigners
to each other, and a college degree has
become the most viable passport. From
the other side comes the squeeze of
inflation with the response of taxpayers'
revolts, higher interest rates, cutbacks in
government and foundation funds for
higher education; the pressure from the
increased birth rates in the fifties and
early sixties; the frustrations of the
young, the drive for professional survival
of those with jobs, the desolation of the
old at being obsolete and disposable in a
throw away, no deposit-no return economy.
There is a growing awareness that
unless we wish this to be the era of the
refugee some different maneuvers have to
be made, or more and more of us will be
trapped, persona non grata.

Of several programs reflecting the
awareness here at the University two aim
to get into college intellectually promising
or able students who might otherwise
be caught in the bind. In both the
two-to-one black-white ratio reflects the
economic pattern in Virginia.

In Upward Bound the fifty-five high
school juniors and seniors come from
within a radius of sixty miles from
Charlottesville for eight weeks on the
grounds in summer and every other
Saturday during the regular session. One
of some three hundred Upward Bound
programs in the country and eight in
Virginia financed 80% by HEW and 20%
by the sponsoring institution, ours has
been particularly successful in our first
graduating class. They are second-year
men in colleges: two here, others in other
colleges in Virginia and nearby states,
some as far away as Texas, California, and
Washington. Out of the forty-four, only
two have dropped out. All have the
necessary support from their colleges,
corporations, foundations, or the government.
This fall the high school seniors in
the program will each be applying to
between three and six colleges. Several
will no doubt apply to the University, but
more do not because of their broad range
of academic achievement and because
many, naturally, want to go away to
school. Were it not for Upward Bound

few if any would have continued their
education. To qualify, the income for a
family of four must be under $3,300, just
about the average in some of the counties
we draw students from. Academic promise,
not necessarily performance, is the
other selecting principle, and this calls for
certain kinds of instruction and an
emphasis on a kind of learning that I
hope to describe at length and with some
leisure at a later time.

The second program, officially titled
"Summer Preparatory" and known unofficially
as "The Transition Program," has
broader financial and narrower academic
selecting principles than Upward Bound.
The students' needs can vary from several
hundred dollars a year to the full cost of
around two thousand dollars. Of the
predictors for academic success here,
most of the students fall within the
normal range on all but one, usually
college board scores in our high risk
range, which can be explained by their
background and is offset by powerful
motivation and achievement in one of the
other criteria such as high class standing,
judgments of high school teachers, high
grades, performance in jobs or other
activities. Last spring nineteen were
offered admission to the University for
this fall as regular first-year men if they
participated, and eight were offered
admission with the option of participation:
a total of fifteen chose the program,
which ran from 15 June to 22 August.

Weekday mornings students had jobs
in the libraries (one had a job in the
athletic department) financed in part by
federal work-study monies to add a few
hundred dollars for the coming school
year, to see the University from an inside
view, and to help operate it. Afternoon
classes in English and Math focused upon
discovery of problems and principles,
instead of upon acquisition of information
from lectures, and the work aimed to
have the men discover for themselves the
working of their own minds, a quiet
pleasure and perhaps the most useful
learning in that it puts the initiative
within one's self. Two evenings a week
some of the eight man staff or a faculty
member from outside the program led
discussions on Plato's "Republic," "A
Separate Peace," "Soul on Ice," "The
Federalist Papers," and other books. We
would have liked to have had a laboratory
science one afternoon a week, but the
budget and time kept the focus upon
math and writing and reading, and the
contact with a science limited to a two
hour introduction to biology and one to
chemistry. The University contributed six
thousand dollars directly, and students,
faculty, alumni, and people from nearby
contributed nearly eleven thousand - the
success of the project will lead to funding
from other sources for next year.

If the experience from Upward Bound
holds true for the Summer Preparatory
Program, and I imagine it will, more of its
students will stay in college than the
average for all other students, their
academic achievements as they near
graduation will be above average, and
their contributions to the quality of life
in non-academic ways will justify our
investment.