Elon University - Phi Psi Cli Yearbook (Elon, NC)

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Courtyards, a fountain and acres of carefully-tended grounds have replaced parking lots and maintenance depots making Elon ' s one of the most beautiful cam- puses in the state. Adding to that beauty is the fact that the school ' s graceful Georgian buildings give no hint of the deferred mainte- nance slowly eating away at so many small colleges. Meanwhile, student enrollment has grown from about 2,000 a dec- ade ago to nearly 3,000 this fall. Applications are up 40 percent in the past three years; rejections have doubled. Ironically, at a time when the number of traditional 18 to 25 year-old students is declining, Elon has succeeded in increasing its en- rollment even as it has tightened its admission requirements. In the past three years, average College Board scores among Elon ' s freshmen have climbed 50 points with 30 points of the increase com- ing just this year. The college cele- brates its centennial, it intends to reject anyone with less than a 2.0.

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THE ESSENCE OF ELON Caring. About students. About its image. Caring enough to expand its campus, curriculum, enrollment financial base and expectations of each teacher and student who enters the golden door. ' 4 -V by Bernadette Hearne Reprinted with permission of the GREENSBORO NEWS AND RECORD. Lauri Crowder, a senior at Elon College, knows many people in North Carolina think her school is second-rate, but she never expected to hear it from a professor at a com- peting school. I decided to go to summer school in Wilmington and be near the beach, Crowder said. Near the end of the session, this professor started in on me about why was I wasting my time at Elon? That I was too smart for Elon. I couldn ' t believe it. I told him he just didn ' t know what he was talking about. Almost every class I ' ve taken here was better than his. This school is so much better than people think. What Crowder encountered was an attitude about Elon that has dogged the 2,800-stu- dent liberal arts college near Burlington since the 1960 ' s. With justification, Elon offi- cials concede, the school ac- quired a reputation as an open-door institution that ad- mitted anyone with a diploma, a place that hired its own pro- vincial graduates to teach — 4 most without doctoral degrees. Its academic program was said to be thin, its demands on students low. But changes have occurred. In the past decade, the percentage of doctoral degrees among Elon ' s fac- ulty has risen from 30 to 70 per- cent, and those degrees are as likely to be from Harvard, Indiana State, Georgia, Mississip- pi, Ohio or Oklahoma as from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or Greensboro. In the past five years, library holdings have tripled from 50,000 to 150,000 volumes. New pro- grams of study include computer science, communications and Elon ' s first master ' s program in business administration. This fall, the college is installing cable television hookups in every dormitory so students can watch the closed-circuit campus televi- sion station emanating from the sophisticated production facility Elon just built. Microcomputers are plentiful, and students have ready access to them virtually any hour of the day. Construction of a major fine arts center is scheduled to begin this fall. Despite all the investment, Elon ' s endowment has grown from less than $2 million to nearly $8 million during President J. Fred Young ' s 1 3-year tenure.

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Nan Perkins, assistant to the president, also is tlie mother of an Elon sophomore. As a parent, it ' s very important to me that the word gets out about how good this school is, Perkins said. We don ' t need to promote it to attract more students or to show off. We ' re trying to give it more respectability. Those students in the middle deserve an education that has a respectability, just as the top students do. Elon . . . promotes itself as a caring place, a college where every student receives personal attention and where every professor is a po- tential friend and mentor. Now that we ' re turning more students away, we ' re getting nega- tive feedback from parents whose children weren ' t admitted, said Joanne Soliday, the school ' s direc- tor of admissions. They say, ' We thought this was a place that cared, ' which really translates, We thought you took anybody. When you put yourself up front as a caring institution and you start turning so many down, it ' s difficult to communicate. Former president Danieley is one of those for whom Elon was the golden door. I could not have gone to col- lege if this place was not here, Danieley said. If I hadn ' t gone to college, I would have ended up in a mill or on a farm. I have so much appreciation for what this place does in the lives of people. Even now, although none of us knows all of the students, the relationship is very much like that of a family, Danieley said. The week before classes started this fall, I had a student from La Paz, Bolivia, call me at 10 p.m. from the airport. He said he ' d get a hotel room for the night and asked if I could pick him up in the morning. I told him absolutely not, got out of bed and went to get him. He stayed the night with us and had breakfast with the family the next morning. I don ' t tell that sto- ry to brag. I tell it because it is typical of this place. Caring is a word used so often at Elon that it almost becomes a