Take Your Choice

At Atlantic City last Friday, a meeting of school and college leaders registered a vote condemning one aspect of admission policies common to many colleges, including Harvard. The particular custom under attack was a ruling that forces students taking College Board Examinations to rank colleges on a first, second, and third choice basis. The vote was 1000 to 0.

Although the group of educators is called the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, the unanimous vote indicates a sentiment that primarily stems from the schools, and only partly and hesitantly from the colleges. The denounced ruling is irritating solely to secondary schools in their attempt to place students in colleges.

The injustice to the applicant under the system, as the schools see it, is that a man who is not accepted at the college of his first choice will not be accepted by the colleges of his second and third choice. There are exceptions--about 10 second choices were admitted to Harvard's present Freshman class. But for these exceptions, the man who is forced, for instance, to choose between Harvard and Yale frequently finds himself entirely done out of an education. For most major colleges consider being indicated the first choice as a vital factor in their admissions policy. If his first choice is Harvard, and if Harvard does not accept him, he stands no chance of admittance to Yale, and vice versa. For both Harvard and Yale as well as most other major colleges, consider being selected as first choice as a vital factor in their admissions policy.

The school does not like this arrangement because it makes the task of placing its students in colleges difficult. In addition, public schools find themselves at a disadvantage in competition with private schools, which usually maintain cagey strategists on their staff occupied primarily with getting the boys into college. The admissions boards see the problem from the other side. Harvard, to take an example, has been faced with three to four satisfactory applicants for each one it could accept during the last few years. It must choose between them on some basis, and finds the choice system as good as any. It feels that students rejected by Harvard most likely would not be accepted by Yale or Columbia, whether or not Yale or Columbia had been alienated by a second choice rating.

Whether or not this is true stands as the central issue. The College Board Examination Committee has received so many letters on the issue that it formed a special committee, with Dean Henry S. Dyer as chairman, to study the problem last spring. This committee reached no satisfactory solution, but Dyer has not dropped the issue, and is currently sending a questionnaire to schools throughout the nation in an attempt to discover the exact effect of the choice-system. He will report to the College Examination Board in the spring.

If Dyer's questionnaire, and a similar investigation being underaken by the Middle States Association, find any considerable number of students out off from the sort of education they deserve, the colleges should move immediately to abandon the artificial distinction. They have examples of the feasibility of such a change. Stanford has gotten along without insisting on the choice system. So has Dartmouth, a college not noted, incidentally, for undergraduates who feel they would be happier at some other school.