Class News

Richard Patterson '64 finds an article about Yale admissions in 1960

March 18, 2019

Rich Patterson emailed: “I found this New Yorker article written in 1960 about Yale admissions during our time. It’s especially interesting in light of the current admissions scandal.” The article is reproduced below.

Rich was referring to allegations that wealthy parents paid to help their children cheat on college entrance exams and to falsify athletic records of students to enable them to secure admission to elite schools, including UCLA, USC, Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown.

The father of Waldo Johnston '64 is quoted in the New Yorker article.  Waldo commented: “I well remember when my dad was interviewed by the New Yorker for this and how impressed he was with the research that was conducted. While it is true that my dad and Yale believed in giving legacies and athletes special consideration in that era, for which many in our class should be grateful, there have been impressive efforts since then to give others deemed disadvantaged that same advantage."

The New Yorker article was published on September 10, 1960. From the timing, it seems clear that the article describes, in detail, the deliberations of the admissions committee resulting in the selection of the Class of 1964.

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A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE BRIGHTEST EVER

by Katharine T. Kinkead

September 10, 1960

Under the heading "United States Colleges and Universities," the current edition of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary lists the names of over two thousand institutions. Of these, the number offering four-year programs of undergraduate study in the liberal arts and sciences is put by educators at seven hundred and fifty. Last year, these seven hundred and fifty colleges received applications for admittance from some seven hundred and fifty thousand secondary-school students — an alarmingly high figure, since the average college can accommodate nowhere near a thousand freshmen and, in any case, the average applicant is notably unwilling to settle for the average college. Under these circumstances, and because the number of young people who annually try to get into college has nearly doubled since the Second World War, the once fairly placid business of college admissions has lately acquired the dimensions of a sizable industry, some of the jargon of a social science, and a structure like that of a vertically organized labor union. Near the base of the pyramid is a large corps of practitioners of the relatively new profession of guidance counseling, at least one of whom is now found on the premises of every up-and-coming high school and prep school in the country. At the pinnacle of the edifice are the admissions officers of the approximately forty American colleges that, if you are over twenty-five and have not recently had reason to concern yourself with such matters, you will probably think of simply as first-rate schools but that, if you are either trying to get into college or trying to help get somebody else in, you will most likely refer to as "selective," "competitive," or "prestige" institutions. While such usages, prime examples of the new admissions jargon, have their origin in the fact that the forty-odd colleges in question have many more applicants than they can take, much of the popularity of the appellations can be traced to the way they protect a guidance man when he breaks the news to querulous parents that their child will have to be content with admission to what he calls "an excellent little liberal-arts institution," which the parents have never heard of.

There is no definitive and immutable list of the prestige schools, but prominent in the category are, of course, the trio that the guidance men always refer to as H.Y.P. (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), and the other Ivy League universities; such midwestern educational giants as the Universities of Chicago and Michigan; Stanford and Berkeley, on the West Coast; and, elsewhere, such relatively small but educationally impeccable institutions as Haverford and Wesleyan. Although the competition among girls for admission to the colleges that the guidance-and-admissions people have dubbed the Heavenly Seven (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley) is just as keen as that among boys headed for correspondingly exalted institutions, by and large it is the struggle to get male offspring into one of the better universities that is more apt to unhinge parents. These days, primary-school teachers have ceased to be particularly surprised by anxious mothers' and fathers' demands to know at once whether their sons are prestige-college material, and by the time a boy is a senior Cub Scout he will, if he is prestige-college material, scarcely bat an eye upon being told that he must work hard on his mathematics so that he can qualify for the junior-high-school honors group that feeds into the high-school advanced-math section that feeds into the high-school advanced-placement math program of college-level work. And by the time the youth has reached his junior year of high school, he is totally immersed in the intricacies of college selection, whether he is headed for comparative literature studies in a prestige college or merely hopes to squeak into one of his guidance man's little liberal arts institutions. He is exhorted to become "motivated," so that he will work "at the top of his potential," and as he enters his senior year, if he has any stuff in him at all, he will probably throw himself into a last, frantic sprint for the highest grades he can pull down-that is, provided he can spare the time from the cycle of reading-skill, intelligence, vocational guidance, and sometimes even personality tests that are being given him to "gauge his strengths and weaknesses," to say nothing of a special examination that is supposed to predict his score on the College Entrance Examination Board tests still ahead of him. In advisers' interviews, assembly lectures by returning alumni, and school-distributed books and pamphlets, he is told how and when to write his first letter to a college, even if it is merely a request for a catalogue; he is instructed in how to dress, act, and talk in interviews with college admissions men; and he is likely to be given from four to six coaching sessions in how to take the College Board tests, which are required for admission to practically all the prestige colleges and to about two hundred and fifty others.

The immediate target of all such effort, analysis, cramming, and prayer is, of course, the college admissions officer. This simultaneously harassed and exalted faculty member may have come to his job as a member of the academic staff who has revealed a talent for administration, or he may be a professional guidance expert. In the small, non-prestige colleges, his main worry, even in these days of educational overpopulation, may be that his institution is not attracting enough applicants to enable it to practice any selectivity in putting its student body together perhaps even to fill its freshman class. At many of the big state universities, by contrast, the admissions man is not troubled by any dearth of candidates, but he may be troubled by the fact that his school's charter or his state's laws force him to accept most of those who apply, regardless of their qualifications, with the result that his office becomes little more than a filing department. As for the admissions men at the top competitive schools, their duties are so complex and their decisions so crucial that they are now probably the most overworked, over-feared, and overcriticized men in contemporary American education. Of all the pitfalls they face, the most frightening, if not the most likely, is the possibility that they will wreck, or at least seriously cripple, their institutions by admitting far more students than can be accommodated, or by committing the colleges to disburse much more money in scholarships than they can afford. The reason either or both of these nightmarish situations can come to pass is that nowadays terrified secondary-school youngsters apply for as many colleges as they happen to feel like applying for, on the theory that the more applications they put in, the better their chances are for getting into a decent school. Unfortunately, the admissions men very often have no way of discovering how many other colleges each applicant is trying for, nor have they any way of knowing, after they have spent months poring over qualifications and culling their lists, how many of the students they decide to admit actually intend to come to their college, or how many of the brilliant, needy youths whom they attempt to lure with scholarships will rise to the bait. The admissions officer's only way of allowing for what he and his confreres call "ghost" applications is to admit more students than there are places in the freshman class. This in no way protects him from waking up some summer morning, after the books are closed, and discovering that he has acceptances from a freshman class either half as large or twice as large as the school has room for. Since the danger of too many acceptances is far greater than that of too few, and since in recent years some prestige colleges have reported receiving up to twelve times as many applications as there are places to be filled, the pressure on these institutions to expand their educational and physical facilities has been enormous. A few have done so, but most have decided in favor of very little expansion or none at all, preferring to defend the liberal-arts tradition as they know it, rather than risk diluting the quality of their scholarship or their instruction.

Among the schools that have most forthrightly taken this stand is Yale University, whose president, A. Whitney Griswold, said not long ago, "We haven’t thought of doubling our student body by 1970, or of increasing it arbitrarily by any fixed percentage. On the face of it, this could be taken for an unresponsive, even an 'undemocratic' attitude, and there are voices that counsel us not to mention it, lest it be so interpreted. I think we had better mention it and acknowledge it, for it is exactly what we mean to do." Over most of the past decade, Yale has had a ratio of between three and four well-qualified applicants for every place in its freshman class, whose size is stipulated by the supervisory Yale Corporation and was last raised in 1941, from eight hundred and fifty to a thousand. Since the tide of Yale applicants is steadily rising, with the ratio now up to almost five boys per vacancy, and since Yale's admissions office has been a leader in trying to solve the problems that arise from such overabundance, I decided early this year to see if I could arrange a series of visits to that office in order to learn how the university goes about making up its freshman class. When I called Arthur Howe, Jr., Yale's Dean of Admissions, he was agreeable to my plan, if hardly enthusiastic about it. "It's practically impossible for us to say anything about admissions these days without sounding either smug or obscure," he said. “We think we're in fairly good shape here now. At least, every year the Freshman Dean's office announces that the new class is the brightest ever. And at the moment we're hunting for boys who will make next year's even brighter." He granted me the appointments I asked for, after jocularly inquiring whether I was sure I wasn't the mother or sister of any current Yale applicants, and also after obtaining my promise both to safeguard the identities of any boys I might write about and to read as many as possible of the folders in which Yale files its extensive information on all those who apply. "It's difficult to understand what we're up against unless you do a good bit of folder reading," he said. He went on to tell me that, because of university rules, I would not be permitted to attend the actual admissions-committee meetings, in late April and early May, at which tile new Yale men are chosen, but that he would be glad to let me sit in with the committee before it began its closed sessions. Having undertaken to abide by his conditions, I made an appointment with him for the following week.

The Yale admissions office is in Welch Hall, one of a row of aging reddish-brown stone structures along the east side of the Old Campus Quadrangle, which was the original, eighteenth-century site of Yale, and most of whose buildings are now used as freshman dormitories. Upon arriving to keep my appointment with Mr. Howe, I entered a pleasantly furnished reception room. Several youths, obviously candidates for admission, sat about, some of them elaborately absorbed in magazines or university booklets, others making no attempt to conceal their apprehension over the coming interviews with members of Howe's staff. The more nervous boys swung their crossed legs, tapped their feet, or drummed on the chair arms, and watched every movement in an adjacent corridor, onto which a number of small offices opened. Also in the reception room, but sitting carefully apart from the boys, were several adults — parents, I deduced from the intent and proprietary way each of them was watching a particular youngster. A tall, slim, dark-haired young woman, who was identified by a card on her desk as Miss Barbara Bonnardi, presided over this jumpy assemblage. When I gave her my name, she told me that Mr. Howe would see me in a moment, offered me a booklet called "An Introduction to Yale," and beckoned me to a chair.

Looking through the booklet, I discovered, among other things, that Yale now has just under eight thousand students, of whom about four thousand are undergraduates, and that approximately seventy percent of the undergraduates ultimately go on to some sort of advanced study. (In the nineteen-twenties, the figure was less than twenty percent.) As I was digesting these facts, a young man with a faculty look about him entered the room from the corridor and read a name from a slip of paper. "John!" one of the mothers whispered stridently to a boy across tile room, who was huddled over a magazine. "You are being called!" John leaped wildly to his feet, caught his heel in the base of a coat rack beside his chair, and was enveloped in a mass of swaying garments. The interviewer helped him extricate himself and, with a light remark and a nice degree of friendly amusement, did what he could to restore the youth's aplomb. Then, after chatting a bit with John's mother, he led the boy off down the corridor. Miss Bonnardi now announced that Mr. Howe would see me, and I followed her past offices that emanated a constrained conversational murmur, above which momentarily rose a young male voice asserting loudly, "Yes, sir. Shakespeare, sir."

As Dean of Admissions, and Director of Yale's Office of Admissions and Freshman Scholarships, Howe is also in charge of Yale's Office of Counseling and Placement, its Office of Educational Research, and its Financial Aids Office, and is, in addition, a member of the powerful Course of Study Committee of Yale College, which initiates all curriculum changes. In view of these numerous and weighty responsibilities of his, I was a trifle surprised to be greeted by a tall, thoughtful-looking man, in dark-framed glasses, who clearly couldn't be much over forty. I learned that Howe had gone to Hotchkiss, and had entered Yale with the class of 1943, which he had left during the Second World War to become an American Field Service officer in the Middle East, North Africa, and Italy. After the war, he had returned to Yale to get his degree, then had taught at Hotchkiss for a while, left there to study for a year at Oxford, and finally come back to Yale, where he served as Assistant Freshman Dean until, in 1955, he acquired his present multiple jobs.

"Sometimes I'm not sure whether I'm doing admissions work or public relations," Howe said. "Many people tend to think that the admissions office is the university, and they drop in from all over the world to tell us about a nephew or a neighbor’s boy. We hurt more people than we can ever please, because we must constantly make judgments and predictions about the characters and future contributions of human beings. So, of course, we make mistakes. Just the same, I hope the day will never come when we think we can measure each individual's potential value precisely."

Initially, Howe said, his biggest problem had been to learn how to live from day to day with an unusually large assortment of conflicting pressures — from secondary schools, from parents, from alumni, from the Yale faculty, and also from his own sympathies. "Of course, none of these things would worry me so much if we didn't have such a glut of applications," he went on. "But there is a bright side even to that. For one thing, the secondary schools have had to raise their scholastic standards, and, for another, we can now pick and choose very carefully among the candidates."

He gave me a brief outline of how the methods of judging a boy's fitness for admission to Yale have changed over the past century. "A hundred years ago," he said, "some professor would line up the applicants outside his study door, admit them one by one, put them through a stiff oral exam in Latin or Greek, and tell them to come back the next day for his decision — a method that some of our faculty members think would still work as well as any that the modern experts have concocted." Around 1900, he continued, when public high schools had sprung up all over America, producing a vast increase in college applications, the colleges needed more exact ways of evaluating the applicants' academic records and abilities. As one means to this end, a system of giving units of credit for secondary-school work was evolved. And in 1900 a group of Eastern universities jointly set up the College Entrance Examination Board, which soon devised the first of a fearsome series of written tests. Until the Second World War, the secondary-school seniors taking College Board exams were required to display their knowledge of the subjects concerned by writing encyclopedic essays or solving complex problems. "By the end of the war," Howe said, "both the system of high-school credits and the essay-type exams had fallen into disuse — the former because it's obviously unfair to give equal credits in English to a boy who has studied Aeschylus and Faulkner at an academically excellent school and a boy who has read not much more than Silas Marner at Cross Forks High. And the old College Board exams were abandoned partly because it was impossible to grade them uniformly — the Cross Forks High boy might write a more brilliant essay than the other kid but get a lower mark, depending on who graded the paper. Also, the avalanche of applicants was just too much for those doing the grading. So now we evaluate secondary-school studies on the basis of the whole pattern of work the student has done in essential subjects, and we examine the youngsters by means of multiple-choice College Board tests, which are graded by machines. Ordinarily, in his senior year of high school every boy applying for Yale takes two College Board scholastic-aptitude tests, measuring his general verbal and mathematical ability, and then three College Board achievement tests, covering three of his high-school subjects — usually English, social studies or a foreign language, and one of the sciences.

In 1946, Howe went on, with entrance requirements less hidebound, and the government paying the veterans' way through college, Yale, for the first time in its history, had about twice as many fully qualified applicants as it could admit. That year, by special dispensation of the Yale Corporation, it matriculated fourteen hundred and fifty boys — four hundred and fifty more than the normal limit. By 1950, the veterans had been fairly well taken care of, but new pressures had been building up as Yale encouraged, and received, applications from boys whose geographical, social, or economic backgrounds might in the past have kept them away. That same year, the College Entrance Examination Board dropped its requirement that applicants list their first, second, and third choice of college on their test forms, and the seams burst open. The waiving of this rule, at the request of secondary-school authorities who felt that in many cases a college might be prejudiced against a youngster who did not make it his first choice, resulted in floods of ghost applications, which have not been stemmed to this day. "Before that," Howe said, "an H.Y.P. admissions officer could count on acceptances from eighty or ninety percent of the applicants chosen, could assume that fifty of these would withdraw over the summer, for one reason or another, and then could sit back and enjoy himself. Now we must accept fifteen hundred candidates to get the thousand we want, and offer about a hundred thousand dollars more than our available funds to produce the scholarship acceptances we count on. The real headache, of course, is picking the right fifteen hundred boys. That figure, by the way, includes about four hundred and fifty boys who are offered scholarships and about three hundred boys who have applied for scholarships but are granted admission without the scholarships. There's always a chance that such a boy will pull a prosperous grandmother out of a closet somewhere, and anyway, even if he has lost out to someone else on a scholarship, we don't want to turn him down entirely just because his father happens to be poor. It's easy to admit the obviously good prospects and reject the obviously weak ones, as it was in the past, but today over eighty-five percent of our candidates are what we would have considered fully qualified twenty-five years ago. In those days, the mean score on the C.E.E.B. scholastic-aptitude test for the entering freshman class was 540, on a scale of 200 to 800 points, which meant that the average Yale student then stood ahead of sixty of every hundred students taking the test. Today our freshman average 640 — something only seven youngsters in every hundred can achieve. And the figure goes up every year. Yet the tests aren't everything. No test ever devised can be regarded as a fully reliable index to general intelligence. But they admirably fulfill their intended function, which is that of measuring the developed academic ability without which no boy can succeed at Yale or any other good college. Actually, in judging a boy's academic ability, we give less weight to test scores than we do to his four-year high-school record. Besides, academic ability is only half of the matter; the other half is what we call promise as a person. You could sum up what we're after as brains and character. We don't put either one first. If high academic ability were the only criterion, we would have to eliminate quite a few future Presidents and great college teachers, to say nothing of the kind of boys Yale would be a poor place without. But high intelligence combined with imagination, vitality, originality, and a capacity for growth — those are the things we're looking for."

Howe sighed. "Which would you take," he asked, "the lad with the high average and the good, sound personality who is going to do well as an undergraduate but never do very much afterward, or the boy who is a B-minus student in secondary school but may later catch fire intellectually — though perhaps not till graduate school — and never stop growing? Which would you admit, the millionaire’s son who is rather supercilious now and is only mediocre academically but will one day fall heir to the means of doing great good for society, or the brilliant academic performer who seems badly lacking in imagination and initiative? And what would you do about the honor-roll boy who has been 'motivated,' because his parents have been pushing him since infancy, and who has had good teaching, but whose aptitude tests suggest that his abilities are only mediocre? He's already reached his academic peak, so in his freshman year here he would be bound to level out and go down. He's what the guidance fellows call an 'over-achiever.' Those are a few of our problem boys. Sometimes I lie awake nights worrying about whether we've been kidding ourselves into taking a lot of brainy kids who are too egocentric ever to contribute much to society. Or have we been taking a lot of twerps who have read the how-to-get-into-college books, listened to their counsellors, and learned to take tests and to give the right answers to interviewers — a bunch of conformists who will keep right on doing the smart thing for themselves? A prestige-college diploma is apparently considered the quickest way up the status ladder, and that's often what parents mean when they say they want their boys 'to have the opportunities that a Yale education offers.' This is perfectly understandable, but how far should a university go in accepting candidates whose reasons for applying are based on such shallow values? Should we admit them in the hope of changing those values, or do we get them too late to accomplish that?"

These unanswerable questions brought us to the more manageable ones of what sorts of backgrounds Yale applicants come from and how the admissions office seeks out the likeliest candidates. "A favorite word around here is 'diversity,' " Howe said. "First of all, we believe that our student body should be drawn from more than the five percent of American families who can afford Yale. We know that a quarter of the country's highly talented youngsters never go to college, and one of our big jobs is to find some of these, interest them in Yale, and give them financial help if they need it. Geographically, diversity doesn't mean too much, although our critics like to remind us that about half of our students come from the general area of the Northeast. But in the past we have enthusiastically grabbed what we thought was a North Carolina Tarheel, for example, only to discover that his family was one of the thirty million that had moved the previous year, and that he had been born and raised in Lynn, Massachusetts. What we're really after is diversity of talent and interest — boys with the unusual flair."

Diversity of school background is another controversial subject, Howe continued. Of the past year's freshmen, forty-five percent went to public high schools, forty percent to private boarding schools, and fifteen percent to private day schools or parochial schools. This, of course, means that the various types of private school supplied over half of the class, although such schools represent only twelve percent of the country's secondary-school enrollment. Part of the explanation of this is simply that the private preparatory schools, as the name implies, specialize in preparing boys for the first-rate colleges, and are highly respected, educationally, by those colleges. But even these schools, Howe said, are having a lot of trouble these days getting as many students as they would like into Yale, Harvard, and Princeton.

When I inquired about Yale's relationship with the various secondary schools, Howe told me he thought I would learn a lot by talking to some of his assistants who annually spend the better part of their time between October and February hopping around among the various schools, interviewing boys who have already applied for Yale and seeking out promising youngsters who have not, in an effort to induce them to apply. The assistants' itineraries cover a constantly varying array of the nation's twenty-eight thousand-odd secondary schools, and their routes range from the sedate Eastern prep-school belt to what they call "the dog-sled trip," around high schools in the far Northwest.

The first of these circuit-riding emissaries I talked to was Arthur F. Tuttle (Westminster '11, Yale '15), whose main concern is liaison with prep schools, and who, when he had welcomed me to his office, three doors down the hall from Howe's, told me something about a practice called grouping, whereby Yale, in the fall, divides the applicants from fifty or sixty private and public schools whose high standards of preparation it can rely upon into A, B, and C groups, and practically guarantees admittance to the A group, in the hope that these youngsters will withdraw their applications to the other colleges. This scheme, which is also followed by Harvard and Princeton, is based partly on preliminary aptitude test scores obtained in the next-to-last year of secondary school, but it also requires some acute evaluation of each boy's talents by Yale staff men working with the school's principal, headmaster, or guidance counsellor. "One reason we tend to trust the prep schools is that usually they have relatively few boys, and a good headmaster knows each boy," Tuttle said. "On occasion, for instance, I've rated a boy as a sure thing only to have a headmaster tell me, 'He's fine in an interview, but, frankly, I have doubts about how well he'd do at a place as big as Yale. His aptitude scores are O.K., but he won't work unless someone is breathing down his neck.' Well, that is the sort of boy who'd probably have trouble at Yale."

I asked Tuttle how well grouping served its purpose of reducing the traffic jam of duplicate college applications. He said, "It helps considerably, but there are still some kids who won't tell even their guidance man what their first-choice college is, because they're afraid that each college has a quota for each secondary school, and that if they announce their choice, they might influence too many others to apply from the same school, and so reduce their own chances. The fact is that we have no quotas of this kind — or of any other kind, for that matter — and If a school that sent us four boys last year has ten good ones applying this year, we'll take the ten. Then, some of the most brilliant boys simply like to collect admissions. Not long ago, one such kid stormed into the admissions office down at Princeton and said to Bill Edwards, the fellow in charge, 'I've been accepted at Harvard, Yale, and twenty other colleges. I want to know why Princeton has refused me.' The only thing I can say for this incident is that it refutes another bit of schoolboy folklore, which is that a youngster who is rejected by one of the H.Y.P. group will automatically be rejected by the others — that we operate some sort of secret boycott system. Well, anyway, we can't make the boys confine their applications to Yale. We think they should retain their freedom of choice, and, along with about a hundred and fifty other colleges, we've signed what is called the Candidates' Reply Date Agreement, which this year gives applicants until May 18th to reply to admission offers from any of the member colleges."

At the end of our talk, Tuttle said he wanted me to meet a colleague whose preoccupations were almost diametrically opposed to his own. This man, whom we found in a nearby office, was Warren Troutman, Yale '39, and he had returned not long before from the dog-sled trip. He told me that his fellow admissions men were a little tired of hearing about the hazards he faced in his travels, so he was delighted to have a new auditor. A typical day on the trail, he said, might include visits to four high schools, followed by dinner with a Yale alumni group, and then by a P.T.A. meeting, or else by a particularly harrowing event called a College Night. At such a session, he explained, seniors from the various high schools in an area are assembled to hear addresses by various college representatives, each of whom is then assigned a desk, where he sits and answers the repetitive questions of youngsters milling about in a bargain-basement sort of fever. The usual attitudes toward Yale (as toward Princeton and Harvard), Troutman went on, fluctuate between polite interest, tempered by fear of the College Board exams, and outright suspicion of the university as the supposedly exclusive preserve of "big, dumb rich boys." However, in the hundred and twenty-five or so schools that Troutman visits annually he always finds a few interested students, and by talking with the four or five most promising hoys in each senior class he usually elicits a number of additional applications, many of them accompanied by scholarship requests.

As Troutman and I were talking, I saw in the corridor the young interviewer who had so adroitly extricated the boy from the coat rack in the anteroom. Troutman beckoned him in and introduced him to me. He was Richard Moll, an alumnus of DePauw and Duke Universities, and the only non-Yale man (as well as the only graduate of Broad Ripple High School, Indianapolis) on the admissions staff. Moll, who is working for a degree in divinity and hopes one day to be a university chaplain, described to me one of the most strenuous interviewing sessions that the staff undertakes in the course of the year. This occurs when a couple of the men spend two days at the Boys' Club of New York, on East Tenth Street, where they talk to a hundred and fifty public- and private-school candidates from New York who can't get up to New Haven. The boys' reasons for being unable to make the trip range from arduous private-school schedules to inability to pay the fare (mostly the latter), and the boys themselves range from Collegiate School seniors to Harlem Negroes and Puerto Ricans, and sometimes include a number of orthodox Jews, wearing their skullcaps, who want to be sure that they can get kosher food at Yale and will not have to take tests on Saturdays. "About three-quarters of the boys we talk to at this session are applying for aid," Moll said. "A lot of them are so terrified by the interview that at the time we can get no idea of what they're really like."

Approximately ninety percent of Yale's interviewees come to the university, rather than let the university go to them, and now, with the admissions committee meetings a few weeks away, Moll and his colleagues were seeing a total of perhaps fifty-five candidates a day. Moll said that the categories of applicants who particularly interested him, and who were therefore usually directed to his office, were handicapped lads, oddballs, boys from minority groups, and Hoosiers. One noon recently, he went on, he had returned to his office to find it aglow with abstract oil paintings, which had been lined up along the walls and propped on the chairs. Waiting to see him were a father and his crippled artist son, and the boy explained to Moll that he got about by means of a specially designed car, which was small enough, he hoped, to be permitted on the campus walks. After a long conversation, which revealed that the boy had realistically contemplated the sort of life he would lead at Yale, Moll took the father, the son, and the canvases over to the School of Art and Architecture, where they were enthusiastically received by the director. "There's one big problem," Moll told me. "The lad needs a companion to help him in the morning and at night, and extra quarters are not easily come by now. So I don't know how the admissions committee is going to feel."

Another unusual candidate he had interviewed recently was a twelve-year-old boy who kept jumping back and forth over the railings of the campus walks as he approached Welch Hall. "An amazing little kid!" Moll said. "His guidance man called up first, to tell us that the boy had exhausted the facilities — and the faculty — of his high school and that no one there knew what to do with him. Neither did his parents, who brought him in here. He had an almost comical way of gazing up at the ceiling and then looking at you hard, and almost at once he announced that he had two questions to ask me. First, he wanted to know if the Benjamin Franklin papers were kept in the closed stacks of the Sterling Memorial Library, and, second, he wondered if he could use the science laboratories at night for private research projects. I said I would find out the answer to the first question, and in reply to the second I gave a nice little sermon about how college was also a time for growing and living, and how working on lonely night projects could be a way of hiding from boys who were doing things natural for their age but not for his. With his permission, I took him over to see Dr. Bryant Wedge, the psychiatrist-in-chief at our Division of Student Mental Hygiene, who later told me that there was no question of the kid's ability to do college work but that he might adjust better here after a postgraduate year at some private secondary school. There the matter now stands."

Moll's mention of the Mental Hygiene Division prompted me to ask whether the university's psychologists and psychiatrists played any regular role in the admissions procedure. He said that although university psychiatrists were customarily asked to check over any applicants who might have been receiving psychiatric treatment, the main service that the psychiatric- and psychological-research sections performed for the admissions office was providing information on methods of personal assessment and discussing those methods with the admissions men in the light of student successes and failures. "We maintain that we can ordinarily predict how four out of five people will perform, even if we can't tell which one of the five will be the maverick," he said. "On the whole, though, we're pretty good at telling which group a candidate will fall into — the Phi Beta Kappas, the failures, or the pass boys. So we can say to a father, for instance, 'Your son's record is the kind that places him in the group where four out of five boys will fail. Unless there's something exceptional about him that will make us believe he may be the one boy in the group who won't fail, we can't afford to gamble on him.' "

At this point, Miss Bonnardi came in to tell Moll that there was another candidate waiting to be interviewed, so I said goodbye. Before I left Welch Hall, I looked in on Howe, and he suggested that I come back the following week, when he and the other staff members would tell me about the actual applications, and how they are rated.

Upon my return, the first of the staff members that Howe turned me over to was a small, graying woman named Miss Nellie Elliot, who, he said, had been a pillar of strength for six admissions chairmen since she joined the staff, in 1918. After Howe had left us, I asked Miss Elliot how many applicants she had interviewed over the years. "Oh, thousands, I imagine," she said, "but now I see only an occasional one — mostly foreign students. I've always been interested in the foreign students, and I hope we'll always take at least twenty of them a year, as we do now. After they arrive, they keep dropping in here for a while. One day they stop, and then I know they're all right."

Coming to the subject of how applications for Yale are made, I asked first of all if there was any truth to the old stories about boys' being entered for the university at birth. Miss Elliot laughed, and said she had heard of no recent instances of this, although thirty or forty years ago it was not uncommon for a boy's name to be sent in to Yale the day after he was born, and the name of one member of the present senior class had been received when he was four years old. She told me something about this student's family and his secondary-school training — information that I later discovered she was able to supply about almost any of the current Yale men and many former ones. "A boy can give us his name whenever he likes," she went on. "All it means is that when we send out the formal application blanks — which we don't do until the September before the new freshman class is chosen — he is sure of getting one. Of course, long before September — in fact, all through the summer — boys are dropping in here. Many families nowadays take their sons on a grand college tour during the summer vacation. Not many years ago, our office didn't even stay open in summer. Now three or four of us must be here, to take care of a continuous string of interviews. The interviewing goes on right up until March 1st, but the application blanks must be in by January 10th. There's a ten-dollar application fee, which, of course, doesn't cover our administrative costs, any more than our present tuition charge of fourteen hundred dollars — it's gone up from three hundred since my early days here — covers our instruction costs. But there are always some parents who feel obliged to protest. One of them wrote on his ten-dollar check this year, 'Payable only if my son enters Yale.' "

Miss Elliot produced a blank set of application papers, which ran to ten pages, for me to look at. The first two pages had the usual dozens of spaces for vital statistics and for information on the applicant's family and his schooling, as well as a place for a photograph, and then came a page that was left entirely blank, for "any additional information which you would like brought to the attention of the Committee on Admissions." Miss Elliot said that only about a fifth of the boys filled out this page, and that many of these devoted it to a paraphrase of what the Yale catalogue said about the importance of a liberal-arts education.

The next pages had to do with application for financial aid, which, Miss Elliot said, was being requested this year by roughly forty percent of the applicants. Here the student must first fill out a budget estimate, which includes the basic college fee of twenty-three hundred dollars (covering tuition, room, board, and various health, laboratory, and insurance fees); a suggested four hundred and fifty dollars for books, clothing, entertainment, laundry, and such; and a travel allowance, varying with the distance between Yale and the hoy's home town. From the sum of all these expenses, the candidate and his parents are instructed to subtract the amount they believe they can pay, ordinarily including from two hundred to four hundred dollars that the student is expected to earn in the summer and to contribute. The difference represents the amount of scholarship help needed. Except for a few special endowed grants, Yale offers no complete gift scholarships. Each scholarship boy must take a university job, at which he will work between six and twelve hours a week, the pay being credited against his tuition. Freshmen usually wait on table, and upperclassmen hold what Yale calls bursary jobs; that is, employment related to their own scholastic interests-research for an instructor in their academic field, say, or hospital work if they are premeds.

"The scholarship thing is terribly complicated, and often almost heartrending," said Miss Elliot. "An organization called the College Scholarship Service sends out and evaluates, for us and other colleges, a special questionnaire designed to check each family's financial status. It also puts out a manual to help colleges compute how much parents can pay, figuring in such factors as mortgages, the number of younger children, the age of the father, how to treat a widow's assets, and whatnot. But unfairness seems to be built into the situation. For instance, take two boys with identical qualifications whose families live in identical houses and have identical incomes. One family has spent every extra penny each year on vacations, home improvements, and so on, and is asking for fourteen hundred dollars in aid. The other family has scrimped along without these niceties and, over the years, has saved enough to reduce the aid needed to eight hundred dollars a year. We can try to balance things out by giving the boy from the happy-go-lucky family a four-hundred-dollar gift scholarship, a five-hundred-dollar long-term loan, and a five-hundred-dollar job, and the boy from tile sacrificing family a five-hundred-dollar gift scholarship and a three-hundred dollar job, but the inequity is still there. And people have very different ideas of need. It's not uncommon to find a widowed nurse, making thirty-four hundred dollars a year and with two boys to educate, saying that she will contribute eight hundred dollars a year to one son's college costs, while a father in his middle thirties, earning twenty-five thousand dollars, and with assets of around a hundred thousand dollars, may declare that he can put up no more than five hundred dollars. Yale has a special form letter for these down-to-their-last-yacht parents, which flatly says we do not consider their sons entitled to aid."

After the scholarship section, there are several pages for teachers and principals or headmasters to fill out, and as I looked through them, I thought they must have brought goose-pimples to many a boy as he dutifully delivered them to the addressees. The principal is asked to rank the applicant according to both "promise as a person" and "promise as a student," on a numerical scale of from 1 to 9, ranging from "outstanding" to "not recommended," and, in addition, to rank him in comparison with other Yale candidates at his school. The principal is also requested to write his estimate of the applicant's "character, intellectual promise, and industry as shown in his total school record." On still another form, a teacher is asked to comment on the candidate’s "intellectual curiosity, industry, integrity, concern for others, influence on others," and to make additional remarks in which "mention of any evident weaknesses will be welcomed." After this, there are generous spaces for the boy’s scholastic record and elaborate questions designed to help Yale evaluate his school's academic standards. This last can be an enormous problem, Miss Elliot explained, because of wide variations in such things as grading standards, passing marks (anything from 50 to 70), and class credits (which some otherwise reputable schools give for courses that Miss Elliot, with a sniff, categorized as "basket weaving"). “When we have a boy who lists a senior program of English, journalism, speech, personality problems, marriage and family, and chorus, with his principal praising him to the skies, Mr. Howe sometimes writes asking why so able a boy is being given such poor preparation," she said. "Last week, we got an indignant response from one school saying that if we'd been more alert, we would have noticed that the boy in question had been elected president of the Student Council, so of course a light schedule had been planned for him.’ ”

The problem of figuring out approximately what a boy's school average means in terms of his ability to do Yale work has been energetically tackled, Miss Elliot told me, by Associate Professor Paul Burnham, director of the university's Office of Educational Research, and after I had said goodbye to her, I stopped in to see Burnham, a scholarly-looking, spectacled man in his forties, He told me that since 1927 Yale has been carefully comparing its freshmen's grades with their previous secondary-school records, and has thereby been able to determine with a close degree of accuracy how the scholastic standards of several hundred schools compare with Yale’s. "Let's take a hypothetical boy from a mythical prep school I'll call St. Swithin's," said Burnham. "His application tells us his average for his junior year there and the first semester of his senior year. First of all, we check over his transcript and cross out courses that we consider boondoggling. Then we take the average of the grades in those that remain, and if they have not been figured on a scale whose passing grade is 60, we reduce them accordingly. On the basis of our running comparisons of St. Swithin's standards with Yale's, we have worked out what we call an adjustment figure, which tells us what the boy's school average should mean in terms of Yale marks — a process that often brings the average down from 95 to 79, say. There are, though, two secondary schools in the country whose grading we consider tougher than ours, and we add one point to their students' averages." Although the S.G.A., or School Grade Adjusted, as Burnham's final figure is called, is entered on the Candidate's application records, its main importance, as far as Burnham is concerned, lies in its use, along with an applicant's College Board examination grades, in computing a prediction figure for the candidate's freshman year average.

A little alarmed at such Orwellian evidence of scholastic determinism, I asked how accurate the freshman prediction figures usually turn out to be. "They're not perfect, thank goodness," he said. "It would be depressing if they were, wouldn't it? And please don't go away believing that these figures are necessarily a decisive factor in whether a boy is admitted to Yale, because ordinarily they're not. But I must say, in defense of our methods, that in recent years the individual predictions have consistently come within four points of freshman averages for half the class and within six points for two-thirds of it." Before leaving Burnham, I inquired about the statement that each year's freshman class was "the brightest ever." In response, Burnham rooted around in a couple of filing cabinets for a few minutes and came up with evidence that, at least statistically, the assertion was correct. Four hundred and eighty-eight members of the present freshman class, he said, had been predicted to make freshman averages of eighty or higher, as against three hundred and four members of the class of 1953, who had entered college ten years earlier. And so far, he went on, the present freshmen seemed to be proving the forecast eighty-eight percent correct.

Howe had told me he would give me an idea, sometime that day, of the way the application folders are sorted and graded before the admissions committee makes its decisions. "By now, we have almost all the information we're going to get on the boys, except for the results of the three College Board achievement tests in high-school subjects, and those scores will soon be coming in," he told me when we met in his office. "We have the school records, résumés of interviews, aptitude-test scores, and preliminary predictions by Burnham's office. There are also reports on candidates from alumni groups, whose role in all this Waldo Johnston, the director of our University Committee on Enrollment and Scholarships, will tell you about shortly. Well, from now right up until the admissions committee meets, members of our staff, along with the six faculty members who are on the admissions committee but are not on our staff, will be reading and rating the folders. Ordinarily, each folder is read by at least two people, and each reader writes on a his work card his general impression of the boy concerned, along with an A, B, or C rating for admission, and, if the folder includes an application for a scholarship, the amount of aid he believes we should give. On the same card, the boy is also given two numerical ratings — the first on his general promise as an individual, estimated on the basis of interviews, the reports of those who know him, and whatever else we have gleaned about him, and the second on his academic promise, as it is revealed by test scores, school records, and so forth. Incidentally, if two folder readers disagree on whether a hoy should be rated A, B, or C for admission, or if they are more than a hundred dollars apart on the scholarship figure, Johnston or I read the folder and adjudicate. We estimate that about a third of the nearly five thousand boys applying this year will be rated A, and that almost half, who are obviously unqualified, will be rated C and rejected. Now, we assume that four or five hundred of the A boys will decide to go to other colleges, so this means that around that number of B candidates can be added. This sorting out of the Bs is our toughest job."

The decisions about which of the Bs make the grade, Howe said, depend not only on their personalities and their scholastic credentials but on the geographical and educational diversity of their backgrounds, which he had discussed earlier; on the need for strengthening existing links with schools or alumni groups, or establishing new ones; and, in a good number of cases, on whether the applicant's father happens to he a Yale alumnus. Yale announces in its admissions booklet that preference will be given to alumni sons "who meet admissions standards," and although, as Howe explained, the college is now tougher than ever before in judging these "legacies," and admits proportionately fewer of them, they still make up about twenty percent of each freshman class, as they also do at Harvard and Princeton.

Howe now directed me to the office of Waldo Johnston, the man principally responsible for liaison with the alumni. Johnston, who was wearing a Yale blazer that bore the crest of Davenport College, told me that he had come to his present job from the post of executive secretary of the Alumni Board, and that before joining the Yale staff he had been assistant headmaster of the Pomfret School. The University Committee on Enrollment and Scholarships, which was started by Yale in 1943 as a pioneering venture and has since been copied by other prestige colleges, consists of eleven hundred alumni, in all parts of the country, who interview about three thousand candidates every year. "They often find promising lads we wouldn't have found on our own," Johnston said. "And even more often they give us realistic, first-hand appraisals of boys we don't know enough about, or boys who are being too highly touted by their schools. In fact, the committee was started after we found ourselves admitting too many boys who were well qualified from the academic point of view but not from any other. Of course, we do want outstanding scholars, but how are we to find out more about the spirit of a candidate — the selflessness, integrity, and honesty that are so badly needed in this day of false ideals? It's in making this sort of judgment of candidates that the alumni interviewers fill an important need. We realize that such judgments are very hard to make, and naturally the alumni vary sharply in their skill at making them. But we come to know each interviewer's prejudices and predilections pretty well, and are able to make allowances for them."

The two most frequent sources of friction between the admissions office and the alumni are legacies and athletes. "The rejection of one legacy whom the alumni in his area consider well qualified can do more harm than we can offset by letting in ten similar boys," Johnston said. "Consequently, we often take ten times as long in deciding to reject one Yale son as we do in deciding to admit someone else. At the end of our two-week admissions-committee meetings, we spend at least half a day reviewing the legacies we've turned down." Last year, he told me, Yale admitted about three-quarters of the four hundred and twenty-eight alumni sons who applied, a ratio that is closely paralleled at Harvard and Princeton. I told him I'd recently heard that at Princeton a disproportionately large number of alumni sons flunked out or were placed on probation, and he answered that although the situation was not too different at Yale, there were still a sizable number of legacies in the top quarter of each class.

As for athletes, Johnston continued, when an influential alumnus in his forties or fifties writes in enthusiastically about what he calls "a well-rounded boy," the chances are very strong that the boy in question is a football player. "Those alumni were undergraduates in the days of T. A. D. Jones and Albie Booth and Clint Frank, when football was a religion here and the Bowl its shrine," he said. "By now, we've patiently pointed out to almost all of them that we're perfectly happy to have them find us athletes as long as the athletes can make satisfactory showings on their College Boards and will study as hard as everybody else after they're admitted. We aren't apt to consider anyone whose College Board average falls below 550, though we have no rigid cutoff point. Anyway, we certainly don't dislike athletes. In a group of similarly qualified candidates, an outstanding athlete — or, for that matter, an outstanding clarinetist — will probably be the one we choose, because we believe that unusual achievement in any field shows unusual strength and self-discipline."

For years, Johnston said, Yale has had a rule that no athletic coach can institute recruiting, but if a young athlete has written to a coach, or has formally applied for admission, the coach is free to correspond with him — to send him monthly department letters and game programs, keep him aware of the admissions-committee deadlines he must meet, and urge on him the virtues of Yale. This gentlemanly assault is conducted entirely by mail, and the inducements that the university offers are strictly limited to hard work on the playing fields and hard work in the arts and sciences the rest of the time. Since this Spartan routine has been known to appear less than enticing in comparison with such goodies as special scholarships, special jobs, specially paid trips to the campus, and special blocks of seats at athletic events, all of which are lavishly dispensed by some lesser universities, I decided to ask Yale's athletic director, DeLaney Kiphuth, how he believed his department was faring under the enforced separation of admissions and athletics.

Kiphuth, who is also a lecturer in history, and is the son of Yale's famous swimming coach Robert Kiphuth, met me in his office in a small building near the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. When I had told him what I wanted to know, he handed me a copy of the regulations of the eight-member Ivy Group, which since 1954 has forsworn both athletic scholarships and extra-remunerative jobs for athletes. Among other things, the regulations stipulate that each varsity athlete has to file an annual statement listing all sources, other than his parents, of gifts, loans, or other contributions toward his expenses, as well as a complete list of these expenses. "Of course, we hope we never have an admissions committee made up of the sort of people who drop dead at the sight of an athlete," Kiphuth said. “We let Arthur Howe know early in the year about boys we'd particularly like to see at Yale, and ask him to tell us if any of them look too weak scholastically, so we can suggest that they apply elsewhere. Then, just before the committee meets, I send over a list of the boys each coach is interested in, and when the meetings are over, Arthur tells us who's been admitted. We have a lot of disappointments every year. But every year, too, boys turn down scholarships elsewhere to come here, because they want no part of the curfews, the segregation into athletic dorms, the supervision of academic programs, and the general feeling of being paid hands that they might get at one of the big football factories."

Kiphuth took me down the hall to meet James G. Holgate, the head freshman football coach, on whose desk lay a large book of newspaper clippings and a pile of sports pages. “Naturally, we try to keep track of promising players," he told me after Kiphuth had gone back to his own office. "And this applies even to prep schools, which are frankly a bone of contention between us and the admissions department. We aren't allowed to have any contact with prep-school boys, because Arthur Howe feels that his office is in very close touch with the schools anyway and that any such contact might give the boys misleading ideas about the role of athletics in admissions."

Holgate went on to say that a tremendous amount of mail concerning football players is constantly coming in from all over the country, and he showed me several examples. One, a mimeographed letter from a coach, with a boy's photograph pasted on it, gave detailed statistics about its subject's running, passing, and punting records. "This same coach put out a newspaper story a few weeks ago saying that the kid already had sixty schools after him," Holgate said. "It's his way of advertising both the boy and himself. Some parents, too, are very businesslike in the way they shop around for colleges. I'm sure a father wrote this one." He handed me a sheet labeled "CONFIDENTIAL!" and I read its final paragraph: "This lad has a 92 average, varsity letters in football, basketball, and baseball, and is excellent material for your consideration. They want him at Holy Cross, Colgate, Michigan State, and Boston College, but he would go great at Yale."

"This is the kind we are more apt to pay serious attention to," Holgate said, passing me a handwritten letter from a coach in the Far West, about a boy I'll call Rodney Carlson, which read, "Rod is a student leader and a typical young American of whom we are proud. He has a respectable average of 92 plus, and has been our center for three years. He has performed tremendously, being the best lineman in our history. He has speed, drive, and hitting force, and is the team's fireman."

"Our alumni representative out there is very impressed with Carlson," Holgate told me, "and we've had several letters from the boy himself. He's quite interested in Yale, and I hope we get him." I thanked Holgate, and made a mental note to try to read Carlson's folder and keep track of how he fared through the admissions process.

When I returned to New Haven in late March for my stint of folder reading, the door of the admissions office bore a notice to the effect that no more candidates would be interviewed, and inside I found only members of the admissions staff and a few other people, who, I later learned, were members of the admissions committee, the composition of which varies annually, but which usually consists of two or three men from the admissions office and four or five from other divisions of the university's administrative and academic staff. Most of those I saw were deeply involved in the same task I had come for. Miss Bonnardi welcomed me, led me into a room lined with filing cabinets, which contained the folders of the applicants, and introduced me to Mrs. Marjorie Heywood, a calm, white-haired woman who has charge of the files. Mrs. Heywood settled me at an empty desk and brought me a couple of armloads of folders that she had picked out at random, along with Rodney Carlson's folder, which I had asked to see.

As I studied the seven or eight documents in each folder, I was continually astonished at how sharply the personalities of the boys whose photographs stared out at me were conveyed by their answers to the form questions and by the comments of their various teachers and interviewers. In laboriously careful handwriting, the applicants announced that their hobbies were whistling in the shower, hunting, fishing, foreign cars, progressive jazz, reading; that they had had summer jobs in motels, in lumber yards, on construction gangs; and that they wanted to be financial experts, engineers, diplomats, teachers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen. Outside of the few who were clearly overreaching themselves, and whose work cards I was not surprised to find marked C and bearing some such comment as "Except for the fact his father is Yale '33, there's not much here," or "Too bad. A perfectly nice lad, but that's about the extent of it," I would have admitted them all. From the folders marked A, I usually got an impression of solidity, purpose, and talent, together with a bursting vigor or a questing thoughtfulness. There was, for instance, a big blond boy with classical features who was a crack football guard and of whom his teacher said, "He shows unusual intuition in translating the most subtle lines of contemporary French poetry. He is strong physically and emotionally and has a perfect inner balance. He's full of refreshing naturalness, quietness, and goodness." Then, there was a freckle-faced three-letter man who has a brilliant mind and imagination and is the most original thinker in his class," according to his teacher's report, which continued, "His fine brain is not entirely in focus. When it becomes so, he will function at the very top academically." Both of these boys had College Board aptitude-test averages of over 700, and both were ranked 2 for promise as students and as persons by their schools. One had a 94 school average, the other a 92 — though I noticed that Burnham's predictions had tumbled their probable Yale averages to 85 and 80.

From some of the C folders came a youthful sense of failure. A boy in the middle of his class at one of the country's top schools wrote that although he realized he was not a "prime candidate," he was now working hard, and promised to do all within his power, "God willing, to bring honor to myself and to Yale.” Another C boy had been marked 4 as a student and 7 as a person by his school guidance man, who finished him off with the dismal summary "This boy reflects sincere motivation in verbal areas, but not in others." This meant, I realized as I read further in the folder, that the boy wanted to be a writer, and found mathematics and science dull fare. The grade that Burnham had predicted for him was 75 — just under the Yale freshman class average of 76.5. The first folder reader had rated him B, but the second, who had apparently interviewed him, had rated him C, calling him "a sloppy, unprepossessing lad, very talkative and only sometimes interesting." Howe had adjudicated the case, reluctantly confirming the C rating. "I suppose the school is right in saying there's too much dreaming and too little real work," he noted. "But the boy is different enough to add something to Yale, and his father, a writer, says right now his son is a better writer than he is. He would be an academic risk, but an interesting gamble." To one C folder, an alumnus who was not a member of the Committee on Enrollment and Scholarships had contributed a gung-ho epistle that began, "I like the cut of this boy's jib! His father is a father of men!” The regular alumni interviewer had evidently looked a little deeper into both the father of men and his offspring. His report said, "This is an attractive chap in spite of his father, who is a bit too smooth. But there are certain things about him which make me believe that he will shy away from any subject when the course becomes difficult, and also influence others to take the easy way out. He was, for instance, offered the advanced-math course but declined it, even though he wants to do graduate work in science, because he said he could not afford to risk getting a low mark." Still another lad rated C, who wrote on his application form that he "was not one of the boys," was described by his alumni interviewer, through various circled adjectives in a series on a printed form, as "sensitive," "frail," "intellectual," "odd," "eccentric,” and "neat." The man had written, "Surely there is room for a boy like this in a university as large as Yale. I expect him to make no contribution as an undergraduate, but he will be heard from in later life."

I found a number of ratings that rather surprised me, and I was particularly perplexed by two. The first was that of a boy I shall call Ned Summers, from a large, excellent midwestern high school, who had maintained high honor marks since the ninth grade, and had a 92 school average and a prediction of 87 as a Yale freshman. In his College Board aptitude tests, he had scored 796 in verbal ability and 750 in math. His school rated him 1 as a student and 4 as a person, and described him as having an "unusually keen, analytical, and logical mind," average maturity, and an influence on his peers "less than his ability warrants." Also, he evidently had some artistic talent. A teacher commented, "Ned is still awkward and inarticulate, and occasionally earns the disdain leveled at him by his classmates, since he does not always gracefully accept deserved criticism. But for the most part he is friendly, socially acceptable, pleasant, and intent on doing a good job. It's hard to be a bright boy!" In spite of all this, the Yale interviewer would have none of him. "I would prefer to see this lad go to Harvard," he wrote. "He's inarticulate, uninteresting, dull, run-of-the-mill." Ned had originally been rated B, but this had been lowered to C.

The second case that perplexed me was none other than that of Rodney Carlson, the football player. His photograph showed him to be a big, solemn-looking lad, and his record was, at first glance, overwhelming. His high-school average was 93, and he stood thirty-fourth in a class of over five hundred. "My first impression was that this boy would make an excellent tackle for any Big Ten team but that he might be over his head at Yale," the office interviewer had written. "This notion vanished almost as soon as he opened his mouth. He is an extremely bright young man. He is an accomplished cellist and has written compositions for both this instrument and the tuba, which he's performed with a college orchestra. A nice lad, clean-cut and a solid citizen." An alumni interviewer described Carlson as a "quiet, reserved, humorous, friendly lad who does not enjoy talking about himself," and added, "I am obviously rather impressed with him." He ended his eulogy with what seemed to be an understatement: "He has, I feel, exceeded the level of individual output for most high-school students." The list of Carlson's junior and senior activities took up more than seventeen typed lines. He not only had found time for football, basketball, and track but had also managed to serve as prom king, president of the Latin Club, president of the junior class, president of the Student Council, president of the school orchestra, vice-president of the school honor society, class historian, chairman of the assembly committee, president of a church youth organization, president of the drive for American Field Service exchange students, and so on and on. Carlson, who was applying for aid, had been rated no better than B, with a scholarship of fourteen hundred and fifty dollars recommended. Arthur Howe had written on his work card, "This is about the biggest B.M.O.C. I ever saw." (The initials, I eventually realized, stood for "Big Man on Campus.") The second reader asked, "Can he stay in college?" I then looked up Carlson's College Board aptitude scores, and found that they were only 487 for the verbal test and 562 for the math.

At that point, Howe came into the room, carrying a well-stuffed briefcase and looking harassed. After a glance at the pile of folders I had read, he commented jokingly on how little headway I seemed to have made. “We break in our new people by having them read folders for several solid months," he said. "After they've been with us about five years, they get so they can average fifteen or twenty an hour. This year, I've given instructions that we must be unusually tough in our ratings, because the competition is stiffer than ever. I'm worried to death for fear we'll be stuck with too many A candidates. It's going to be murder to cut them down." He added that no one on the staff could spare the time just then to answer any questions I might have, but that he would arrange for Ernest F. Thompson, an Associate Freshman Dean who had formerly served on the admissions committee, to drop by and see me that afternoon. Thompson, who, I learned, is a New Zealander, and a member of the Yale faculty of sixteen years' standing as a lecturer in zoology, oceanography, and meteorology, turned out to be a tall, ambling man, dressed in tweeds and a plaid shirt, with sandy hair falling over his forehead and a face that looked as though it had been carved by sea spray. When I told him of my perplexity over some of the ratings, he was amused and sympathetic. "Even after years of experience," he said, "you sometimes have the nasty feeling that you could take all the thousands of work cards except those for the five hundred students at the top of the list and the five hundred at the bottom, whose ratings nobody could honesty question – and you could throw them down the stairs, pick up any thousand, and produce as good a class as the one that will come out of the committee meeting." He asked which folders were troubling me, and I handed him the Carlson lad's dossier. After scanning it, he left to get the boy's freshman prediction figure, which had not yet been entered in the folder, from a file in another room. "His prediction is 61," Thompson said when he returned. "Under the circumstances, I'm afraid he won't make it. Everybody liked him, it's true, and it might be a case where you could say we're being too stuffy about academic requirements. But if you consider it a bit, there's something monstrous about all that activity. And how did he ever get that 93 average, anyway! In fact, how did the boy ever have time to read a book?"

Next, I handed Thompson the folder of Ned Summers, the awkward, inarticulate youth with the 87 prediction and 796 English score whose alumni interviewer hoped he would go to Harvard and who had been lowered to a C rating. "I suspect that the committee is going to have quite a discussion about this lad," Thompson said. "Sometimes you can't give any logical reason for feeling uneasy about a boy, and making a decision against him. But, you see, your mind stores up the histories of fellows you've known here. Somewhere there is a mental picture of a boy like this who clearly would have been better off, as Yale would have been, if he'd gone to another college."

I then produced the folder of a B-rated prep-school boy whose father, I knew, was one of Yale's important benefactors. The boy himself wrote, in his application, "All my life I have had things too easy. My parents tended to spoil me, treating me more as their friend than their child and making little effort to develop in me the self-discipline that would have helped me form study habits. Now I have to do the job myself. I began it last year. It's a slow task, but I am sure I will complete it." The staff man who had visited the applicant’s school wrote of this applicant, "A gawky, nice lad, unimpressive on all counts. I warned him he would have to make a lot of progress if he is to qualify. I'm rooting for him!" The boy's average was only 72.3, though both of his aptitude scores were higher than Carlson's. His headmaster wrote, "A pleasant, friendly person as you come to know him. He is quiet and retiring, serious and practical, with little imagination. He is a plugger and will never set the world on fire. But he will work and keep on trying even if things are not too easy for him. He has his own kind of dignity, as well as something soft and somewhat young for his age. You will often see in his face a sensitivity, a sweetness, a moodiness, and a certain potential strength. I am certain he will grow to a fine, sympathetic manhood. He is coming up fairly quickly this year."

"The main thing about this chap," Thompson said after examining the boy's senior grades, "is that he is coming up. You can be sure he will not get in unless he can do the work. The sort of pressure on Howe that this folder represents is fairly routine. You'd be surprised at the eminent people whose boys are turned down. Apparently it's just about impossible for brilliant fathers to realize that the chances of their sons' being equally brilliant are very small. I have the greatest respect for Howe. He stands his ground."

Now Thompson began shuffling through the folders I had not yet read, to see if there were any that might illustrate other special problems. In a few minutes, he opened one, and I saw from the attached photograph that it was that of a handsome Negro youth. "Here's part of the price we pay for our academic standards," Thompson said. The boy, whom I'll call Bob, came from a highly industrialized Eastern city and was applying for a scholarship. He reported that he could contribute only a hundred dollars from his summer earnings, because the rest had to go to his family, whose total income was thirty-eight hundred dollars a year. "This boy's parental guidance has been intellectually and morally far from what one would consider desirable," the alumni interviewer wrote. "His parents are almost illiterate — his father an unemployed invalid and his mother a laundry worker. Both his younger brothers dropped out of school in the eighth grade, one because of asthma and the other because of heart trouble. Bob has had remarkable success in both scholarship and athletics. He is No. 1 in his class of 500, and has had a straight A average since the seventh grade. He is the first Negro president of the Student Council, and is also the varsity quarterback and captain of the No.2 basketball team in the state. I am impressed with his sensitivity, alertness, and modesty. His record has so impressed his own race that the area's leading Negroes are guaranteeing five hundred dollars a year toward his college expenses." The initial excitement of the Yale staff over Bob's candidacy was clearly evidenced by the documents in the folder. Then the boy's College Board scores had begun coming in. In the aptitude tests, he had averaged only 488, and in his achievement tests he had scored 398 in English, 437 in social studies, and 474 in physics. The last papers in the file were a letter to his school's principal from Howe and the principal's reply. Usually, Howe wrote, in the case of a disparity between school record and test scores, Yale gives greater weight to the school record, but Bob's College Board results, if he were admitted, would certainly be the lowest in the entire Yale class. "Yale is prepared to give the necessary financial assistance," the letter went on. "This youngster seems clearly to represent the kind of leadership that his race critically needs. Bur certainly it would be a tragedy if he were to come to Yale and not be successful in meeting the requirements." Howe then asked the principal to tell him frankly whether he felt that Bob could do Yale work. The principal's letter obviously represented as much worried thought as Howe's. "I am now certain that Bob would be unable to do the work at Yale," he wrote. "Evidently he has worked to his greatest capacity here with us and has spent many long hours achieving his grades."

As the time for the committee meetings drew near, I found that I had become intensely interested in the fortunes of a number of boys — both A candidates and borderline cases. One boy whose fate I was curious about, but whose folder I had deliberately ignored, was a family friend I had known since he was a child; my guess was that he would not be admitted. Also among my dark-horse entries, in addition to Rodney Carlson, Ned Summers, and the son of the important alumnus, was a Puerto Rican boy, the eldest of five children, whose parents were on relief. He had spent the past two years on scholarship at a well-known prep school, whose headmaster, recommending him, wrote, "He has had to come all the way on his own, and the way has been long. His strength lies well below the surface, as he has had little instruction in how to make a successful impression. As an undergraduate, he will not be in a position to realize his potentialities, because he is still working to catch up, but his potentialities are great, and will, I am confident, be realized before many years following graduation." His prediction figure, I noticed, was only 62.

The last boy whose fortunes I'd become interested in I'll call Grant Todd. Howe had handed me his folder one morning with a glint in his eye. Grant's case was well summed up by the alumni interviewer's report: "This lad comes from an outlying county in one of the less populous Northwestern states. He has a rugged, strong face. He's awkward, odd, homely, and shy and has a most unusual inner self-determination. His background is the most important thing about him. His father runs a small dairy farm — a subsistence proposition — and there are three younger sons. His mother once taught school up in the mountains. They have one mule, a 1950 pickup Chevy, no debts, and seven hundred dollars in the bank to buy seed, etc., for their next year's wheat crop. Their income varies from twenty-six to thirty-one hundred dollars, and they offer two hundred out of it, plus the entire five hundred Grant has saved from summer jobs. Grant is the top student in his high-school class of a hundred, popular and respected and good at baseball and basketball. His principal speaks of his 'superb reliability' and his 'stabilizing influence.' The school has a limited curriculum (no foreign languages) and has never had a graduate go out of state to college. His counsellor is as much surprised as I am at Todd's application. Neither of us is able to find out where he got the idea of Yale. He just says quietly he is determined to get a liberal education and then study law at Yale. He has never been out of his community, and when I pointed out what a big step this would be, he was unimpressed. I rank him near the very top — 2 — as an individual. As a scholar I can make no recommendation at all." Plainly, Yale was similarly stumped. "Would we kill him if we took him?" queried one admissions-committee reader. Burnham had taken a deep plunge and come up with a shaky prediction figure of 79. The next thing I found in Grant's file was a letter from Howe to one of the country's best preparatory schools, saying that Grant "comes awfully close to epitomizing the kind of talented youngster we all talk about and do very little about." Howe had proposed that the school take the boy on scholarship for the last half of his senior year, and then for summer school. The final documents in the dossier were a report from the prep school, recommending Grant for Yale on the ground that he had been slowly forging ahead scholastically, and a report on his College Board aptitude and achievement scores, which ranged from 500 to 657.

The first meeting of the admissions committee was on Friday, April 15th, and when I entered Welch Hall that morning there came to me from the far end of the corridor the rumble of many voices and the smell of tobacco smoke. Although I would not be permitted to hear the group's deliberations on individual boys, Howe had said that I might sit in long enough to hear him review the over-all admissions situation for the year and to get an idea of how the committee works. He had already told me that the only university restrictions under which the group operates are those limiting the class size and those stipulating the amount of money available for scholarships, which this year would total $220,000, to go to a quarter of the students accepted. (These grants do not, of course, extend to the ninety or so students who are beneficiaries of what the admissions men call "outside scholarships," such as National Merit awards, endowed by the Ford Foundation and other private groups and corporations; General Motors scholarships; and Naval R.O.T.C. scholarships. ) Miss Bonnardi led me into the committee room, a large chamber dominated by a long table, where the nine members of the committee already sat, their jackets off and their sleeves rolled up. At the head of the table was Howe, wearing a tense, anticipatory expression that made me think of a man who is about to start pushing uphill an enormous weight that must reach the top at a given instant — in this case, May 10th, the deadline for notification of the applicants. Below Howe sat the two men from his staff who were on the committee, Waldo Johnston and Ralph Burr (the Director of Financial Aids in the admissions office), and the six other members: Harold Whiteman, Jr., the Freshman Dean; Grant Robley, Associate Dean of the School of Engineering; Richard Carroll, Associate Dean of Yale College; Oswald Tippo, Eaton Professor of Botany; H. Bradford Westerfield, Assistant Professor of Political Science; and Richard R. Shank, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. I sat down in one of a group of chairs across the room from the committee table. Nearby were various people from Howe's department who were not members of the committee but who had come prepared to furnish information on applicants when it was needed. By herself at a small table against one wall sat Miss Elliot, huddled over a list of the applicants and ready to mark down the action taken on each.

Howe opened the meeting with the announcement that the sessions would run from ten to five-thirty six days a week, and from two to seven-thirty on Sunday, for approximately two weeks. After each day's meeting, he said, he and the staff would review the folders of the boys whose names were coming up the following day, taking particular note of those whose scholastic status might have changed, those whose A ratings seemed questionable, and those about whom there would probably be special discussion for some other reasons. He went on to tell the committee that this year's competition had been tougher than ever, with five hundred more candidates than in 1959, and a great many more scholarship applicants. “We had a total of 4,760 fee-paid applicants," he announced. "A hundred or so have dropped out, and a couple of hundred more have not yet been rated, because their records are still incomplete. For admission without scholarship, we have a total of 2,437 applications, 910 of them rated A. For admission with scholarship, we have 1,957, and 721 of these have been rated A. In all, we have 1,631 A candidates, 249 Bs, and 2,514 Cs."

"How many of the A candidates have we given commitments to in the grouping
process?" one committee member asked.

"Five hundred and fifteen," Howe replied. "And I think that, with only a few exceptions, they are all boys you will want to take, although we can count on matriculation of only about two-thirds of them. Among them, incidentally, we have so far given only about thirty-five scholarship commitments, so our task is to choose about six hundred boys to be admitted without scholarships and about four hundred with scholarships, to bring our total up to fifteen hundred."

On the table before each committee member lay two heavy volumes, each about three inches thick, into which had been compressed, in highly telegraphic form, essential data about each of the candidates. The books, which are arranged by geographical regions, by states within each region, and by schools within each state, list six or eight applicants per page, with four or five lines of hieroglyphics for each. Opening the first volume, Howe translated, for the benefit of the committee members, one of the entries, which looked approximately as follows:

AS GREEN ARTHUR WILLIAM 34YC J 1600 41
2 SAN FRANCISCO CALIF 2354 90 1 83 1
2 ARROW SCHOOL ARROWSMITH CALIF
D 709 761
M-EN 763 SS 761 CH 664

This, Howe explained, described an A-rated boy who was applying for a scholarship ("S"), whose name I have changed to Arthur William Green, whose father was a 1934 graduate of Yale College, who was known to be a scholarship applicant at other institutions (“J” meaning “Joint Applicant"), who would require $1,600 in financial assistance, and who had himself been born in 1941. Green had been rated 2 for personal promise by an alumni interviewer in San Francisco and by his teachers at what I have called the Arrow School, in the nonexistent town of Arrowsmith, California. The "2354" meant that he had been rated 2 for personal promise by his school principal, 3 by one Yale reader, 5 by another, and 4 by still another. His School Grade Adjusted was 90, and his freshman prediction was 83. The “1” after the "90" meant that Burnham's office gave the highest possible rating to the scholastic standards of Green's school; the "1" after the "83" meant that the prediction was based on the fullest data possible. The fourth and fifth lines summed up Green's College Board tests: in December he had taken the aptitude exams and scored 709 in verbal skill and 761 in math, and in March he had taken the scholastic achievement tests, scoring 763 in English, 761 in social studies, and 664 in chemistry.

Miss Elliot had promised to tell me when I must leave the meeting, and I glanced uneasily at her as the group went on to discuss Green in more detail, referring to the folder readers' comments on him, reading from interview reports and from his teachers' questionnaires, and analyzing his school grades. Then, as they began the same process with the next boy on the list, I realized that Howe was going through all of the candidates on one full page of the big book to refresh the minds of the committee members on the various rating methods. At the close of an exhaustive discussion of why one boy's high-school average had suddenly dropped (apparently because he had been made football captain), Howe called for the voting to begin, and Miss Elliot hurried over and asked me to leave.

I saw very little of either her or Howe during the next two weeks, though I dropped in at the office fairly often. In the filing room, where I had done my folder reading, clerks and bursary boys dashed to and fro, putting away the dossiers on candidates who had already been voted upon and digging up those of the boys next in line, and occasionally a staff man hurried in from the committee room to search for the folder on a boy whose case had been reopened in the light of some decision on another candidate. The phones rang almost continuously. Many of the calls were from anxious principals and headmasters, and these were told that Howe would wire or phone them as soon as he had word on their students. Even more calls were from applicants. Often, after listening to an apparently breathless query from a boy, Miss Bonnardi or Mrs. Heywood would ask soothingly, "What college is raiding you?" The "raiders" were colleges that either did not subscribe to or were not abiding by the Candidates' Reply Date Agreement and had already sent out their bids, demanding immediate decisions. The anxious boys were told that their school heads should get in touch with Howe, who would wire them as soon as the cases had been decided. In one instance, though, when an Indiana boy called to report that he had only twenty-four hours before he must reply to a scholarship offer from Amherst, his folder was rushed right into the committee, and soon Moll, the Hoosier enthusiast, emerged to dictate a wire to Miss Bonnardi. Moll's message, which Miss Bonnardi later told me she had discreetly edited a bit, was "Damn Amherst. Definitely accepted. On aid requested chances good but not final. Hold fast." A few conscientious school directors called to report sadly that theretofore promising boys had had to be expelled because of sudden scholastic or disciplinary disasters, and a few people — educators or parents — called to make outright appeals that certain boys be accepted. (None of these pleas, I was told, were as insistent as one a few years ago from a United States ambassador, who not only called from his foreign post to demand that a particular boy be taken but later the same day had his secretary call back to make sure Yale realized that it had indeed been His Excellency who had phoned.) On one occasion, Mrs. Heywood dashed in to Howe with a special-delivery letter that, he later told me, came from a father whose income had just been drastically reduced and who was worried about whether he could still afford to send his son to Yale. The committee made an appropriate increase in the aid given the boy.

On some days, I learned from one of the staff men, a lot of territory was covered by the committee, while on others things ground to a halt for what my informant called "one of our glorious fights," among which had been several over how far the committee should go in favoring legacies. Another prolonged disagreement had arisen over the candidacy of a boy from a small fundamentalist religious sect known for its rigid customs and outlook. Debate went on for an hour and a half over whether the youngster could adjust to Yale without a profound shock to his equilibrium. He was finally accepted.

"These committee people aren't yes men," Miss Elliot remarked to me during a break. "They ask a huge number of questions, and they continually challenge university policy. Each year it's announced that there is little or no point in reviewing all the records of the boys rated A, but each year they are gone over. The Bs get very intensive reconsideration, and even the Cs aren't a closed book, by any means. Every case on which the staff readers have disagreed becomes a long-drawn-out affair, as most of the contents of the folder are read aloud. That's what is done with other problem cases, too. The prodigal sons always get the attention, don't they?"

When the committee adjourned, on May 2nd, it had definitely admitted 1,509 boys, put 289 more on a reserve list to await possible vacancies, and delegated to Howe and his staff the unenviable task of deciding which hundred out of about four hundred borderline cases would also be put on the reserve list. After two days and nights of furious work in Welch Hall, the final list was ready to go to the clerical staff, which sorted the bids and rejections for mailing, so that — theoretically, at least — they would arrive everywhere in the country on Tuesday, May 10th. Every principal or headmaster whose school had Yale applicants was sent a notice telling him how all his boys had come out. To every successful candidate went a form notice with a request for an early decision on Yale's bid, and a request for a non-refundable fifty-dollar registration deposit against his future expenses. All the boys who had not made it were sent letters signed by Howe, who saw to it that those among them whose fathers happened to be alumni were not notified until the news had been broken, also in letters from him, to the old grads.

Almost immediately, the accepted boys began to flood the office with their replies, some making excited calls to the staff men who had interviewed them, others sending scribbled letters and cards. "May I extend my sincere thanks for your invitation?" wrote one boy, while another, who had been rejected, took it like a man, to the extent of thanking the staff "for all the consideration it has given my application," and adding, "I know it is a tremendous task to consider and choose a student body." One Southerner wrote, "I am overjoyed and gratified to learn of my acceptance at Yale, but an unexpected consideration compels me to accept Harvard instead. My mother would like you to please add the enclosed hundred-dollar check toward the education of some needy boy from our state, as she says she will always have a soft spot in her heart for Yale." Many boys who were put on the reserve list withdrew their applications, and twenty-five who were accepted have not been heard from yet.

A couple of weeks after the admissions meetings had ended, I made my final visit to Welch Hall, and found it restored to comparative calm. On my way in to see Howe, who had promised to tell me how the boys whose candidacies I was following had made out, I met Moll, who paused for a chat. He told me that three youngsters were still gnawing their fingernails and trying to decide between other colleges and Yale, which had given them a few more days to make up their minds. The Indiana boy who had been raided by Amherst had decided on Yale, he added, but the crippled artist had been turned down, solely because the special attendant he needed would have had to occupy space in a dormitory, and there was no space left. Moll had won an office pool whose object was to come closest to guessing the number of boys who would have sent in their acceptances by May 18th — in this case, nine hundred and six. "And, finally," Moll said, "the Freshman Dean's office is already telling us that the incoming class is the brightest ever."

I found Howe looking considerably more relaxed than when I had last seen him. I congratulated him on the number of acceptances and on the brightness of the class, and he thanked me soberly. "I wish I could feel more elated," he said. "But the trouble is that you so often know you have turned down boys who are just as promising as the ones you've taken. You don't know why. It just turns out that way." He went on to read me part of a letter, from that morning's mail, in which a mother begged to be told why her son had been rejected when boys with lower test scores and school averages had been taken. Her son, she said, was completely discouraged.

"Her son's a good boy," Howe said, leafing slowly through the youngster's folder, which lay on his desk. "He could probably do work in the high 70s here. Well, I could write a book to this woman." Howe also had the folder of the boy I knew, who I had been sure would be rejected. "That friend of yours was admitted," he said, "and on not as good a record, or such high exam scores. We just thought he was more of a guy than this lady's son. Your friend isn't much of a scholar. In fact, as far as schoolwork goes he's mediocre in comparison with many others, though he has a fine brain. But his guidance man summed it up pretty well when he called him 'a sensitive, intelligent force for good.' Well, we turned down boys doing honors work in order to accept him, and that's our answer to people who say we don't take chances on the slow developers."

I learned that Rodney Carlson had been rejected but that the athletic department was fairly happy anyway, since the accepted candidates included the football guard who liked French poetry, the freckled three-letter man, a quarterback whose College Board average was over 750, and a couple of ends with predictions for honors work. The committee had turned down another fine athlete, however, only to learn that he had been given a scholarship by what a staff member called "Yale's most intellectual rival." The important benefactor's son had been rejected, the Puerto Rican boy had been accepted, and Ned Summers, the inarticulate youngster with the high test scores, about whom Thompson had been apprehensive, had been put on the reserve list (but, I've since learned, ultimately didn't get in). Grant Todd, the determined Northwestern boy from the subsistence farm, was definitely a member of the new freshman class. When I indicated my pleasure at this, Howe gave me a stern look. "The boy whose mother wrote to us is abler than Grant Todd. Sometimes I think there's a peculiar form of self-justification in our decisions. I guess we're trying, in the words of the original Yale charter, to serve 'Church and Civil State.' But the sad fact is that two or three of every ten such long-shot chances we take just don't work out."

Now, Howe went on, the admissions staff was looking ahead to next year. "The atmosphere was pretty thick around here after the lists went out," he said. "Disappointed people rang our phones for days, and there was a line of parents practically with bullwhips out in the anteroom. I don't see how we can endure another year like it. We won't sacrifice the thoroughness with which we consider each candidate, so we're making some changes. To give ourselves a little more time, we're advancing the deadlines both for applications and for all of the College Board exams to December. And to help us further in evaluating the boys we've decided to ask for, of all things, an additional test — and an essay test at that. It will be given by the College Board people, but read by us. The boys will simply be asked to write for an hour on some such subject as 'The Most Meaningful Experience of My Life,' and we think the results will give us some insights we don't at present get into their ability to organize their thoughts and to set them down, as well as into their characters."

Just before I left, Howe said, "If there's any real skill in this work, it's probably in shaping the over-all composition of the class — in working out what seems to be a balanced design. But if you want to know how difficult it is, come up here in September and sit on the fence out on the Old Campus and watch these kids arriving, with all their hopes and fears in their faces, and all their parents' hopes and fears right behind them — not to mention ours. Then ask yourself which ones will make good and which ones won't."