University Gains Prestige by Giving Perks to Scholars

After becoming president of Cal State Long Beach 10 years ago, Robert C. Maxson acted quickly to try to attract academically stronger students to his campus.

His key initiative was the President’s Scholars recruiting program. It offered full-tuition scholarships, housing, book stipends, extra academic counseling and even such perks as free parking for California high school valedictorians and for other star students who ranked within the top 1% in the National Merit Scholarship competition.

Today, campus officials say, the effort is a proven success. About 365 students currently are participating, including many who say they would have gone to prestigious University of California campuses such as UC Berkeley or UCLA if it weren’t for the President’s Scholars program.

Average SAT entrance exam scores for the entering freshmen classes, meanwhile, have climbed at the 35,000-student campus.

“These kids have long coattails,” Maxson said, referring to his President’s Scholars. “When valedictorians of big high schools are going to school here, it’s OK for other smart kids to come to school here.”

The Cal State Long Beach program provides a window into the nationwide competition among colleges and universities for increased prestige and improved academic rankings. The battle is particularly intense among the nation’s most elite schools, with institutions such as Washington University in St. Louis, Emory University in Atlanta and USC offering scholarships and other benefits to recruit top young scholars who more likely would attend Ivy League colleges.

But programs such as the one at Cal State Long Beach show how the competition has spread to schools that would never be confused with Harvard or Stanford. Most of the schools in the 23-campus California State University system offer similar recruiting programs for top students, although system officials say Cal State Long Beach’s is the biggest and best-known.

The students entering the President’s Scholars program at Long Beach typically call the scholarship money a major factor in their decisions, many saying that they wanted to avoid going into debt paying for their undergraduate schooling. The money figured prominently even though the young scholars were chosen based solely on academic performance, without regard to family income.

Other attractions are the opportunity to study close to home and to get extra personal attention from administrators and faculty, in a setting where they expect the academic competition to be less intense than at an Ivy League or top UC school.

The average SAT score for Cal State Long Beach’s entering freshmen last year was 1,018 out of a possible 1,600, up from 895 eight years earlier. It is now close to the national average of 1,026, but still more than 200 points below the most selective UC schools. For incoming President’s Scholars, the average score is 1,355.

“What was really important to me was not necessarily the prestige of a college and what people think when you say, ‘Oh, I’m going to so-and-so,’ but where I was going to be happy,” said Whitney Donaldson, a President’s Scholar for this fall and a National Merit Scholarship finalist.

Donaldson, who graduated from San Marcos High School in June, said she plans to work hard at Cal State Long Beach but she expects the education there to be “less personally stressful” than at an elite school.

Still, Maxson argues that top students wouldn’t enroll at Cal State Long Beach if they weren’t convinced they would receive a first-rate education. “If they don’t think they’ll get into medical school [after attending Cal State Long Beach], they won’t come,” he said. “Our job is not to sell them on the scholarship. It’s to sell them on the fact that they’ll pay no academic penalty by coming here and turning down the other schools.”

Maxson said evidence of the program’s success is the fact that since it was launched in the fall of 1995, only five or six students have quit, and none of them left for academic reasons. About 310 President’s Scholars have graduated from the school.

Occasionally, though, the program triggers resentment. Mandy Wright, a President’s Scholar who graduated this spring with a journalism degree, praised the program but said the various benefits -- including guaranteed housing on a campus with precious few dormitory rooms and priority registration for classes -- irritate some students.

“With students who didn’t know I was a President’s Scholar, I’d hear them talking about the program and saying things like, ‘Well, if there are all these budget cuts going on, why are we still giving these students free tuition?’ ” Wright said. “There are some hard feelings on campus toward the program.”

On other grounds, too, honors programs and similar recruiting initiatives around the country draw some criticism.

Researchers such as Anthony Lising Antonio, an assistant professor of education at Stanford University, question whether the money for such programs would be better spent on tutoring for students in need of academic help.

Maxson dismisses that argument, saying that nearly all of the cost of the program is covered through private donations.

On the other hand, studies show that star students recruited through such programs raise the performance level of their classmates, a phenomenon researchers call “peer effects.”

Maxson, who was chosen University President of the Year by student government leaders in the Cal State system for each of the last three years, is the program’s top salesman. Students and their parents note that Maxson, an Arkansas-born, Mississippi-educated academic with a Southern accent and folksy charm, gets personally involved in recruiting and stays in touch with the President’s Scholars.

In recruiting students, Maxson makes a point of citing the elite universities, including Ivy League schools, that many graduating President’s Scholars have headed to for graduate school. A key recruiting pitch is that the students can get their undergraduate educations at Cal State Long Beach for free, and save their money for costly graduate school educations.

That strategy made sense to Kathy Gainey, an early President’s Scholar who later went to Harvard Law School, earning her degree a year ago. She said she opted for Cal State Long Beach as an undergraduate because she knew she would receive a good education, but also because she was looking ahead to the costs of law school.

Although Gainey is convinced that graduating from a big-name law school is crucial for landing a good job, she said top students have more leeway in choosing an undergraduate college.

“You can attend any undergraduate institution and, if you work hard, and if you do well there and you achieve a lot, you can go pretty much to any graduate school you want,” Gainey said.