School Lures Scholars With Scholarships : Education: University offers the same enticement to top students as it does for athletes. But participants must volunteer for 10 hours of community service a week.

CINCINNATI —  Here’s a small private school with a national reputation as a basketball power and a full acquaintance with luring top athletes with fat scholarships.

But now Xavier University is offering the equivalent of those scholarships to top scholars, not just jocks, provided they volunteer to aid the needy in society--the retarded, the old, the abused, the drug-scarred, the homeless.

They get full tuition, room and board, and incidentals, such as books. And, as with the athletes, need is not a factor.

The glare of television and headlines focus attention on the likes of Tyrone Hill, a 1990 graduate of Xavier now with the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Assn.

But the likes of Sean Grandstaff and Christine Dunn and Heidi Rauch and Krista Sahnd are unsung, unheralded.

They offer no tangible pay-back for the school of about 4,000 undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students. Unlike the athletes, they don’t sell tickets, don’t bring in a penny.

It’s an altruistic and daring program. Its creators believe it is unique in academe.

Xavier, a Jesuit institution founded in 1831, is giving these fellowships to outstanding students who volunteer for 10 hours of community service a week. It is essentially the same package of benefits the athletes get.

Nationally, the school is probably best known for the Xavier Musketeers, who have made the NCAA basketball playoffs every year for the last five years. But these community service fellows serve the city’s worst neighborhoods with society’s worst problems.

There is no special fund, nor do recipients pay anything. It is just Xavier money, money that might otherwise go into salaries, buildings, other scholarships.

It costs about $15,000 a year per student and when it reaches all four years the program will cost the school as much as $300,000.

Jan Jantzen, the dean of enrollment services who arrived at Xavier in 1987, is the man who dreamed up this fellowship. So far he knows of no imitators.

“I can’t guarantee it’s unique, but I think by now if there were other schools doing it, I would know about it,” Jantzen said.

The first group of five fellows were chosen sight-unseen. Sixty winners of academic scholarships were invited to apply by submitting an essay. Only 20 or 30 even responded.

Today, applicants must be in the top 3% of their graduating class, have an SAT score of 1,300 or better, and a track record of individual service in high school. If they are awarded the fellowship, they must hold a 3.0 average their freshman year and a 3.2 average thereafter.

Current fellows participate in the interviews. They know it is really more than a 10-hour week and they can explain it firsthand.

Fellows may not hold a paying job during the academic year and can select any service that interests them. They must vary the service over the four years. They meet with an adviser once a week and have one day with one of the Jesuits, a day in which they discuss how the program is affecting their attitudes.

The fellowships do not automatically go to the smartest kids. The service record counts.

“The ones we like to find are the undiscovered, just quietly out there doing service,” Jantzen said. “It’s not just because their church group went out on a few field trips. We’re looking for the students who are doing this solo, it’s their hobby and their personality.”

Applicants have consistently been far above the guidelines. Of the 119 who applied last year, 20 had perfect 4.0 high school averages. The average was 3.85 and SAT scores went up to 1,500.

A perfect SAT score is 1,600 and each year about two or three high school seniors in the country achieve it, Jantzen said.

Although the Jesuit motto has always been service, the man who came up with the idea is not only not Jesuit-educated, he is not even Catholic.

Jantzen came to Xavier from Emporia State College in Kansas, where he was dean of admissions.

As a freshman football player at the University of Kansas, he had always been troubled by the special privileges accorded to athletes. He felt that friends of his, gifted students, should have been treated equally.

“When I became familiar with this institution’s mission, my discomfort over the athletic scholarships, which was really an issue I had never fully addressed, was heightened,” he said. “I felt we were not really acknowledging our mission of service if we weren’t willing to put our money where we said our mission was.”

So he proposed the idea.

Result: Sean Grandstaff, a junior, worked with mentally retarded epileptics and coached basketball in an inner-city school.

Heidi Rauch, a sophomore, learned to sign, to coach the cheerleading squad and tutor at St. Rita’s School for the Deaf.

Christine Dunn, a 19-year-old sophomore, worked with the elderly with severe memory loss and ran a once-a-week self-help meeting for abused children in Kentucky.

Krista Sahnd tutored at a latchkey day-care center, worked with homeless women and their children, and this year will work with the police department to help keep kids off drugs.

Seven others worked in similar surroundings.

The first recipients are entering their junior year now and the program has been refined since they were chosen.

Some of the original rules didn’t work out, nor were the fellowships right for some of the recipients. Two juniors dropped out of the program because of academic and personal commitments. The others remain.

Three more are in this September’s incoming class and Jantzen plans to ask for six or seven for the 1992 incoming freshman class.

Christine Dunn had full academic scholarships to seven schools. The “service fellowship” made Xavier her first choice.

“It was so unique and I wouldn’t just be another academic person,” Dunn said.

Besides working with the elderly, Dunn’s once-a-week meeting with abused children, which she found herself, was an eye-opener.

“Most of them don’t realize they are abused,” she said. “They just accept it as part of their life. I remember once a brother and sister said their grandpa picked one of them up by the hair and threw them away from the dinner table.”

In her sophomore year, Sahnd worked with homeless women. She found that more fulfilling than her freshman year, when she worked at a latchkey program.

“As a tutor, I was just another face, but at Bethany House, I’ve become much more involved and they offered me a paying job for the summer,” she said.

What Xavier doesn’t want is an institution using these very bright kids as paper shufflers, truck unloaders, chauffeurs, or budget-balancers.

“They need the experience of dealing with people on a one-to-one basis first,” said Adrian Scheiss, director of freshman admissions, who oversees most of them.

One young man, the type who can fix anything, chose to work in a halfway house in bad need of repair. He put in some wall board, rewired parts of the building, and hung a door that could be locked so the residents felt safe.

“It wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing, but I didn’t stop him because I saw the enjoyment he was getting from it, and it was temporary,” Scheiss said. “He soon moved to more traditional service.”