
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 7, 1994                   TAG: 9411160010
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LOCAL TIES

WITH ALL the talk about higher education as an engine of economic development, the merits of education for its own sake should not be neglected.

Consider that, at Hollins College, applications for this year's freshman class jumped to 704 for 280 places, and enrollment is up 30 percent from last year. Numbers like that, riding a wave of student interest in women's schools, can only boost the college's reputation for providing a high-quality liberal-arts education to undergraduate women. Never has the value of such an education been higher.

But classes for undergraduate resident students who hail from out of town isn't all there is to Hollins. This fall, the college has embarked on a "Discover Hollins" campaign to make better-known the resources available to the Roanoke Valley community outside the campus borders. Items:

The college's graduate curricula - their schedules geared for adults living and working off-campus - have grown to include master's-level programs in psychology, English writing, children's literature, teaching, and liberal studies, including a concentration in computer studies. The graduate programs are open to both men and women.

Each year, more than 200 Hollins-sponsored events - from chamber concerts to art exhibits to science lectures to foreign-film screenings - are open to the public at no charge; other events are open to the public for a small ticket price.

During the summer, the college hosts a variety of camps for young people of various ages; some are day camps specifically for those living within commuting distance.

The Women's Center offers life-planning and other classes, and career counseling. The career-counseling services are available for men as well as women.

As a large, state-supported research university, Virginia Tech dominates higher education in the Roanoke region. Efforts to tighten Tech-Roanoke ties, and to increase Tech's presence in the Roanoke Valley, are not misplaced.

But "Discover Hollins" is a reminder that Roanoke is not without other higher-education resources as well, whether they be at Hollins or elsewhere in the valley, and that the value of higher education to a community's welfare is multifaceted. In working to enhance higher education's role in the life of the Roanoke Valley - a role critical to the region's future - the mistake would lie not in thinking too imaginatively, but in thinking too narrowly.

by CNB