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NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — Clara Miller's son-in-law drives her to school, carries her heavy book bag, steers her around patches of ice in the parking lot and runs interference in the stairwells where undergraduates push and shove.

Her back hurts most of the time. Her hearing is not good enough to sit in the back of a lecture hall unless the professor is using a microphone. She has had breast cancer and cataract surgery. She struggles to recall names and dates.

It's not easy being a 92-year-old college student. But with schools catering increasingly to what are called nontraditional students, there is a lesson in her story on the possibilities and limitations of multiple generations on campus.
Mrs. Miller is the oldest student in the State University of New York system, and 14 credits away from a degree in music. Six of those credits will come this semester, at the SUNY campus here in New Paltz, where she is taking two courses: The Ancient World and Sexual Discrimination and the Law. Still ahead is the dreaded science requirement, which she has put off, the same as many an 18-year-old. But if she can push through a heavy schedule next year, Mrs. Miller — white ringlets, stretch pants and all — could graduate with the class of 2002, alongside her 26- year-old granddaughter, Kristina Volberg.

"I used to say I got this far, so why should I bother going to college," said Mrs. Miller, who has played and taught piano and organ, directed operettas, written church pageants and translated German cantatas since she graduate from high school 75 years ago in Buffalo, where her father was a Lutheran minister. "But everyone in my family but me had a college degree, and I didn't like that."

Mrs. Miller was telling her story from a rocking chair by the window in her apartment in Wappingers Falls, where a wall clock plays snippets of classical music every hour on the hour. Her schoolbooks are piled on a card table within easy reach. Her computer, linked to the university, is in the spare bedroom. Housecleaning has taken a back seat to her studies, she said, apologizing for the clutter. So was watching her favorite television shows, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and "Jeopardy!"

In the fall of 1998, Mrs. Miller saw an advertisement in The Poughkeepsie Journal offering credit for life experience through New Paltz's Nontraditional Learning Program. Similar programs offer credit based on tests. Others accept course work from institutions that do not grant degrees: corporations, military institutes, private training organizations.

But SUNY New Paltz uses the portfolio method, pioneered by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning in Chicago. For Mrs. Miller, that meant enrolling in a three-credit course in which she prepared a narrative description of her accomplishments and goals and claimed credits for specific New Paltz courses based on her experiences.

Each student is graded on the course (Mrs. Miller got an A) and then submits the portfolio to the vice president of academic affairs, who decides how many credits to grant. The usual maximum is 60; Mrs. Miller was awarded 88, more than anyone had ever received at New Paltz, according to Sarah Lawton, who runs the program. It takes 120 to graduate.

Most of Mrs. Miller's credits were in music, including sight singing, harmony, music theory, chamber music and the like. She was also credited with one semester of theater, three of German — her first language, since her father emigrated from Alsace Lorraine — and two of English composition. The only credit denial was for public speaking. "I couldn't understand why," she said, still miffed.

The documentation in her loose- leaf binder was voluminous: five inches thick, in plastic sleeves, separated by dividers. Included were concert programs, sepia-and-white photographs from performances, yellowed press clippings and testimonials from students, including Buffalo Bob of Howdy Doody fame, who studied piano and organ with her for 11 years.

Ms. Lawton concedes that college officials might have been generous with credits, given Mrs. Miller's age. But she said Mrs. Miller's accomplishments, and her skillful documentation of them, justified the credits.

Lee H. Pritchard, chairman of the music department, said that the hundreds of students Mrs. Miller has taught, and her esteem in the Buffalo music community, more than warranted the number of credits, which made Mrs. Miller a second-semester junior when she enrolled in the spring of 1999. "She was a prominent name," he said. "And she just never stopped."

But if one goal of having older students on campus is allowing younger ones to get to know them, that has not been easy to achieve. Mr. Pritchard spoke regretfully of how the regular undergraduates ignored the unusual classmate in their midst. "Students don't engage each other or the faculty in conversation these days," he said. "They are so concerned about the classes they have to take, and their grades, that the rest of educational life passes them by."

Asked about her fellow students, Mrs. Miller said, with no hint of insult, that they paid no attention to her. And in fact, in a day of trailing her from class to class, nobody spoke to her, nor she to anybody.

Teachers, however, see Mrs. Miller as a resource. Nancy Kassop, an associate professor of political science, who gave Mrs. Miller her lone C, in Government and Politics, is now teaching Sex Discrimination and the Law and encourages Mrs. Miller to tell stories of her past to a room full of undergraduates with nose rings and backward baseball caps.

One recent day, Mrs. Miller raised her hand to say that in her father's church, in the 1930's, women were barred from voting at congregational meetings, even if they were widowed and thus disenfranchised. She added that she was kept from applying to college, despite graduating at the top of her high school class, because her brother was in the seminary and her father could not afford to educate them both. Later she described a narrow upbringing in which she was virtually conscripted as her father's organist at 15, uninspired by a dull piano teacher and rarely exposed to professional performances.

Only after high school, when she traveled weekly to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, did she find herself, Mrs. Miller said. There she studied piano under Ernst Bacon and organ under Abel Decaux, attended lectures by Ravel and Poulenc, went to opera rehearsals, tried her hand at conducting.

"It was the first freedom I felt in my life," she said.
Through two marriages and several moves, Mrs. Miller continued with her music. She directed choirs in Buffalo, performed in an eight- piano recital to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Steinway company, was music director of a church in Illinois and administrative assistant in the music department at Concordia Teachers College.

Mrs. Miller's 61-year-old daughter, Wilma Volberg, learned of some of her mother's accomplishments by joining her in the portfolio class. Her son-in-law, Herb Volberg, 63, drives her to the campus and moves the car from one parking lot to another so Mrs. Miller doesn't have to walk too far. That affords her the vanity of leaving her walking stick at home.

"Everybody tells me how spry I am," Mrs. Miller said. "I can't walk around here with a cane."