from Jazz Baby:

A check with the Stephens College registrar shows that [Billie] took a secretarial course with classes in English composition, typewriting, preventive medicine (health), shorthand, bookkeeping, psychology, foods (home economics), religious fundamentals (required), and rhythm (a dance class in the physical education department).

She lived at Main Hall, one of the buildings at Stephens that no longer stands. She worked as a waitress in the dining hall downstairs and lived upstairs with other work-scholarship and tuition-paying young ladies.

Stephens College enjoyed a nationwide reputation for the high level of motivation and success of its graduates -- an inordinate percentage of whom went to eastern schools for postgraduate work and became noted missionaries, administrators, and educators. A "benevolent dictator" is credited for most of that: James Madison Wood, president of the college from 1912 to 1947. The native Missourian, educated at Columbia University in New York, came to Stephens when there were three buildings and 50 students. When Billie arrived, ten years later, there were twelve buildings and 550 students -- making it one of the largest women's colleges in America. (By the time of Wood's retirement there were 2,200 students.) The girls called their beloved president "Daddy Wood."

Click here for a large photo and bio of Wood from the 1923 Stephensophia yearbook.

from Jazz Baby [Editor's note: Given the recent release of Mommie Dearest, the below early 1980s recollections should probably be taken with a grain of salt]:  

K.C. historian Fred L. Lee reports that his uncle, a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, remembered Billie as a "favorite of the Phi Delts." She was apparently going with a fellow who was in the fraternity [posited by Jazz Baby to be Eddie Smith] and she often would come over to the house -- located at 606 College -- and party on the weekends.

"My uncle remembers her 'doing the hot dances of the period' on a table they used to have there in the hallway of the house. Some of the parties, he said, were rather wild ones. Apparently she 'liked to party' and often as not would end up upstairs with her boyfriend and others afterward to 'party on their own.' It seems this was a fairly regular occurrence at the house. My uncle also recalled her as a very ambitious woman. 'She was the kind of gal who knew what she wanted even at an early age and would do anything to accomplish it.' He thought she had no ethical standards at all."

The Phi Delta Theta house was massive and masculine, cloaked in carved paneling, decorated with heavy dark-oak furniture, with a main hall (party room) girded by a second story balcony and crowned with a ceiling of heavy beams....The table Billie danced on was probably the one in the foyer of the main hall; it was a small dining table of sturdy oak beside a fireplace.