Education: Scholarships Galore

For bright U.S. high school graduates these days, scholarships pop up like gold nuggets in a lucky miner’s pan. Last week from its headquarters in Evanston, Ill., the National Merit Scholarship Corp. announced the names of 850 winners—a record crop in the biggest, fastest growing privately supported scholarship program in U.S. history.*

When it was launched four years ago, N.M.S. got 19 companies to agree to foot the college bills of deserving youngsters, started off by testing 56,000 students. This year N.M.S. tested 480,000 (32% of all U.S. high school seniors), has 87 sponsors ranging from Sears, Roebuck, which has financed 350 scholarships so far, to the Central Soya Co. Inc. with one. By the time the 1959 crop graduates from college, the companies will have given some $15 million to 3,000 National Merit scholars. And, beside the actual scholarship winners, 10,000 selected 1959 Merit finalists can count on aid from such other sources as colleges and foundations.

In the lives of high school youngsters, N.M.S. has become as influential as college-board exams, marriage or the draft. Not all educators are happy about it. Some feel that schools are beginning to compete for the honor of producing winners, that teachers are teaching for the tests. This controversy is likely to grow, an ironic contrast to recent (cries that not enough of the nation’s promising students” are getting to college.

*Biggest public program: the Navy’s Holloway plan, which this year paid full tuition plus $600 annual retainer to some 6,000 college students.