In a representative week (the third in February) "Misc" led with the inaugural production of the Vassar Radio Workshop, scheduled for Saturday; the second lead story concerned Soph Party, and annual original musical comedy scheduled for Friday and Saturday. The Chronicle on Saturday led with Soph Party and relegated the radio story to second position. Within the normal range of Vassar opinion, however, "Misc" is considered left of center and Chronicle somewhat conservative. The divergence is hardly startling.
Surprisingly Democratic Society
Students and alumnae told the Mellon pollers that in "extra-curricular activities the community favors students with certain types of backgrounds." This oblique suspicion of snobbery was dispelled by the report.
Analysis showed that economic, geographic, and religious background plays no appreciable role in campus politics. It showed too that 43 percent of scholarship students hold organizational office as opposed to 34 percent of non-scholarship holders.
The economic and snobbery problems arise rather in the dating pattern, for it obviously requires a little extra money to leave college for weekends or even to invite dates to Poughkeepsie. This is bound to cause a certain amount of social cleavage; for the girls who go to football games in the fall and New York night clubs in the winter inevitably build up a store of experience and reminiscence which excludes the less favored and causes a rumbling of social jealousy.
On the whole, a truer picture of the makeup of Vassar society is given by the fact that while 135 of the 250 schools whose graduates now attend Vassar are public, only a little over 17 percent of the students receive scholarship aid. The first figure is distorted by the larger number of girls from each of the private schools represented in the college.
While Vassar resents being referred to as a school for the daughters of Park Avenue, the dominance of New York City is betrayed by the statistic that exactly half the enrollment comes from the North Atlantic states, and only 20 percent each from the New England and North Central areas. Ten percent are Southerners, and the remainder are Westerners and foreigners.
The "all-inclusive" tuition charge is $1600 a year--due for a raise soon--which is $300 over the normal sum of annual Harvard term bills. Art, music, and dramatic training require extra fees. Thus with less than a fifth of the school on scholarship, with $800 the outside limit on short term loans, and with the "self help" program not expected to net any student quite $200 a year, Vassar College is not troubled with too noticeable economic stratification.
The Brewer Again
The official educational philosophy of Vassar College "is based on the conviction that a liberal arts training at a residential college is the best educational plan yet developed for the fulfillment of individual potentialities and as preparation for useful citizenship."
This statement is quite close to Matthew Vassar's conception of Vassar as an "institution which shall accomplish for young women what our colleges are accomplishing for young men."
To the outsider, Vassar seems full of attractive, friendly girls, interested in personal relationships and the world around them, socially among the most consciously sophisticated, but intellectually among the most healthy naive.
To the student, Vassar is a reasonably happy place to prepare for a life centered in family and community, a good life and a contribution to society. One might even say that the good Matthew's formula has produced a tasty brew.