Sponsors Exchange Goods and Services for Tuition : A Number of Today’s College Students Bartering Their Way to Degrees
When Terry Leonard graduates from Waynesburg College in 18 months, she will have a moving van company to thank for part of her degree.
Donated plumbing fixtures helped pay for Chris Stewart’s senior year at Park College in Missouri.
And office furniture from a cracker company made up the $900 Lovie Foxworth needed to graduate from Aurora College in Illinois.
The students are the beneficiaries of a scholarship program that barters a company’s goods, services or used equipment for tuition credits at 140 mostly small liberal arts colleges and a fe1998615918received a total of $2 million in scholarships through the system over the last four years.
“It was kind of funny when I told my friends about it--a scholarship from a plumbing company,” says Stewart, 21, a Chicagoan who received a $1,175 grant this year from Allied Plumbing and Heating Supply Co. of Chicago. “But I’m grateful to them. It would have been a tight squeeze without it.”
“It was a lifesaver,” says Leonard, 35, of Washington, Pa., who received a $1,500 grant from Allied Van Lines. “I would not have been able to continue without it.”
Barter Middleman
The “middleman” who arranges the swaps and decides which students will benefit is Educational Assistance Ltd. of Glen Ellyn, Ill.
The brains behind the 4-year-old non-profit organization is founder V.R. (Swede) Roskam, who says he can ask anyone for anything, “as long as it isn’t for myself.”
“We’ve got the best program in America since they made square wheels into round wheels in terms of reaching out,” says Roskam, an ebullient, white-haired man of 57 with a white beard. “What we’ve got is Americans helping themselves.”
The concept is simple, he says. Companies donate their equipment or services to EAL, often taking a tax deduction. EAL then sends a list of the equipment and its value to participating schools, which “purchase” the gifts by crediting their value toward tuition for needy students.
Students apply to EAL for scholarships, which are awarded in the corporations’ names on the basis of need and academic performance.
“We’re interested in the hard-core disadvantaged, regardless of color,” Roskam says.
Allied Van Lines donates its vans to haul the equipment, the cost of which is converted into a scholarship the college offers in the company’s name.
The colleges also pay EAL 10% of the value of the goods to help cover the agency’s administrative expenses.
Four full-time and four part-time EAL employees, working in donated office space, evaluate students’ applications, compile lists of donated goods for the colleges and coordinate distribution and transportation of the equipment. Little is warehoused because EAL doesn’t have the facilities and most companies want to get rid of the inventory as soon as possible.
Roskam, meanwhile, is constantly on the road, drumming up new donations from corporations and seeking more schools to take part in the program. His company, Oil-Dri Corp., has given him a two-year leave of absence with pay to expand the EAL program.
Tuition can be bartered for just about anything.
Roskam recently negotiated a deal with a resort in Wisconsin to use its hotel rooms in the off-season for college faculty conventions, and he once swapped a horse for a $3,000 scholarship that was awarded to a Chicago youth. An X-ray machine and argon laser were on the latest list of items available for barter.
Business Trip
Roskam came up with the idea of bartering goods for tuition while flying home from a business trip in 1980. As sales vice president of the Chicago-based company that makes clay-based chemical absorbents, Roskam was on the road more than he was home and had little opportunity to fulfill his desire to do volunteer work.
“On the plane I picked up an article in Time about bartering,” he says. “I must have read it 40 times, and I just started putting it together.”
After assembling a board of directors, Roskam began soliciting corporate donations.
“We wrote a bunch of letters and got a lot of ‘Dear Johns’ back,” he says.
But Lee Flory, the vice president of W.W. Grainger Co. in Niles, Ill., liked the idea and donated $10,000 worth of electrical products.
“We had the product to give, so that made the decision a little less onerous,” Flory says. “I don’t believe we’re getting any inordinate tax advantage. That was not our primary concern.”
Flory passed the word to other corporate executives, Roskam kept pounding the pavement, and the program caught on.
EAL helped resuscitate Terry Leonard’s college education just when it appeared that she would have to drop out of school for lack of funds.
The mother of two began pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business management at Waynesburg College in 1985 after her husband had been laid off from his welding job for three years. Armed with just a high school education in this hard-hit mining area, she had only been able to find jobs that paid the minimum wage. She hoped that a college education would open new doors.
But Leonard decided that she would have to quit her studies when her federal grant of $1,500 was discontinued this summer. She had taken out as many loans as possible and funds were scarce after her husband’s long years of unemployment.
A financial aid officer at the southwestern Pennsylvania college who heard of her problem suggested that she apply to EAL. Within weeks, the organization approved a scholarship in time for the fall semester.
Lovie Foxworth’s $900 scholarship was approved in April, a month before she was to graduate in elementary education from Aurora College.
Because she had spent much of her free time last year as an unpaid student teacher, a requirement for her studies, she had less time to devote to her campus work-study job. Like Leonard, she had exhausted loan possibilities.
Now a Teacher
“I was having a lot of difficulties,” she says. “They don’t let you graduate and get your diploma until the bill is paid.”
Foxworth graduated, paid her bills and is now teaching at her old elementary school in Chicago, with the help of a scholarship from Nabisco.
