The most important possibility is that it would allow teachers to work all year round. By using their skills full-time, teachers could probably earn more than one-third more pay, since administrative cost would not increase proportionally. In a school with initially high salaries like Exeter, the increase would make them competitive with industry, and in other schools, salaries might at least rise above the subsistence level.

But the high salaries now available at Exeter actually constitute a difficulty, for many of the older teachers are already well enough paid so that they would be very reluctant to start teaching full-time. The long summer vacation is one of the natural disadvantages of teaching, but it is also one of the great appeals.

For other schools, summer operation would also present certain peculiar difficulties: requirements for promotion in many public schools, for example, presume that teachers can study during the summer, and gain additional academic credits. And both public and private schools face the risk that working full-time might make a teacher "stale." This danger is especially acute in boarding schools like Exeter, for when the teacher lives in the same building with students and sees them a great deal outside the classroom, teaching becomes a full-time job, instead of an "hours only" occupation. In colleges where the work load is far lighter, the change in curriculum might seriously disturb the balance between research and teaching.

One feature of the four-term year which particularly appealled to the Exeter group was its flexibility. Special plans of study for the gifted or the weak student could be easily achieved within the present schedule, but that such a feature would automatically accompany the four-quarter program was an argument for its adoption.

Teacher Fatigue

But the committee felt that the opposition of parents and the risk of decreased educational efficiency outweighed all the advantages of a four-term year. Against the additional attractions for potential teachers, the committee felt that fatigue and the difficulties of rehousing those who were not teaching during a particular term were serious problems. Against the economies of full-time operation, the opposition of parents and students was a decisive obstacle.

In addition, Exeter faced two peculiar obstacles, which are perhaps limited to the small group of schools and colleges which enjoy the kind of success Exeter has attained. When a school has 1500 applicants for 250 places, and an educational formula based on multi-million dollar gifts (from the same Edward Harkness who gave Harvard's houses and Yale's colleges), it seems doubly risky to introduce radical changes which could virtually wreck the school if they failed. The committee discussed the possibility of setting up a pilot group within the school to test the plan, but concluded that no really significant results could be obtained in a group of practical size.

In addition, since Exeter derives more than a third of its income from a large endowment (higher per student than Harvard University's), experimentation with the curriculum offers minimum financial benefits. If Exeter increased its size and went onto a four-quarter schedule, it would actually lose money (per student), despite the increased economic efficiency. Although the loss would be a matter of less than $40,000, and could easily be covered by a nominal increase in tuition, the fact remains that, for Exeter, or any school or college with a substantial endowment, the financial gain of the revised curriculum is largely lost. For most schools, the prospect of cheaper education would be the main reason for change.

But the motivation is not solely economic. The faculties of institutions such as Exeter or Harvard feel that they have a unique experience to offer, and any way they can find to offer it to more students is, of itself, justified.

Bard College, in Annandale-in-Hudson, is free of many of the difficulties besetting Exeter. Working on a $13,000 grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education, it initiated a pilot study to determine the practicality of a four-quarter program. The original announcement sounded like some sort of educator's daydream:

Bard's Objectives

"1. Keep the College plant in operation 12 months a year;

2. Permit the College to accommodate about twice as many resident students as its facilities would otherwise allow;

3. Increase the number of student taught by each faculty member by one third without materially altering the system of seminars, tutorials and individual conference courses that has distiguished the Bard program for the last quarter of a century;

4. Permit able students to complete their collgee requirements in three years instead of four; and