THE RACE TO COLLEGE In Manhattan last week a purposeful child was asked where he is going to school next year. At once he replied:
"Boarding school and Harvard.'' The boy is four years old, and already papa has him concerned about college. At 17 he may well become what one educator calls the U.S. high school senior—"A bundle of nerves in a rat race." Never before have so many Americans coveted the 700-year-old Artium Bacca-laureus—and never before has the competition been stiffer.
By all the evidence, Americans will soon consider at least two years of college a socioeconomic necessity. As if this pressure were not enough, war babies are now beating at the college gates. This June the nation's high schools will graduate 1,803,000 students. In 1964, according to the U.S. Office of Education, the crop will billow to 2,309,000. The prediction: by 1970, college enrollment will nearly double to roughly 6,400,000, and it may go as high as 9,000,000.
From Berkeley to Cambridge, the wartime baby boom has already hit the country's 100 big-name colleges, and especially those in the East. Last week, as the annual waiting season began, Princeton reported a 20% rise in applications for next fall, "the greatest single jump we've ever had in a year." Yale will cull 1,000 freshmen from 4,800 fee-paid applications, 500 more than last year. Harvard has 5,000 final applicants, a record boost of 900 over last year. Yet freshman classes remain the same size. Harvard will actually try to cut its next class by 50 to 1,150. Says Princeton's President Robert F. Goheen: "Our first concern is to do well with our current number of students. After we've provided for them, we'll think about increasing our enrollment."
NO PAYOLA
To Harvard's Dean of Admissions Wilbur J. Bender, the hold-down headache is "grim, grimmer, grimmest." But he says it with a certain smile. In the past five years, Ivy League colleges have been able to raise their admission standards 50%. Reason: brighter and brighter applicants. Last year two-thirds of Princeton's applicants were deemed perfectly capable of Princeton work. But only one-third could be admitted, and Princeton skimmed the richest cream. Says Director of Admission C. William Edwards: "The bottom one-third of the applicants of ten years ago wouldn't even bother to apply now."
In the process, old Ivy mores have vanished. Harvard still gives early consideration to seniors at 100 top secondary schools, but admission is something else. Not long ago, Andover sent 75% of its boys to Harvard, Yale and Princeton; last year it squeezed in only 43%, and sent the rest to 44 other colleges across the land. Yet Andover offers its brightest students a wider range of college-equivalent courses under the Advanced Placement program.