When Selective Service announced last February that it would no longer defer most graduate students, academe responded with alarm. Harvard President Nathan Pusey complained that first-year classes this fall would contain only "the lame, the halt, the blind and the female." The Council of Graduate Schools predicted that most such classes would be slashed in half. Now most graduate school deans concede that their anguish was unwarranted, or at least premature. Fall enrollment will be surprisingly close to normal.
Nationwide, graduate school applications are actually running about 10% higher than a year ago. Some schools, anticipating a shortage, have accepted...