Misguided Zeal

The administration is now considering adoption of a Yale-sponsored $10 student application fee, designed to meet spiralling admissions costs. University Hall would justify the fee on the ground that this is an era of multiple applications. Because so many students apply to Harvard but never attend, the University apparently feels that they should help bear the cost of processing applications.

Such a plan, however, seems to place financial book-balancing above Harvard's quest for a high calibre student body. In discussing the importance of quality personnel over economic solvency, President Conant once noted that a university could be bankrupt even if the annual auditor's report showed a dollar surplus. Solvency and Harvard's continuing success, he said, depend almost entirely upon its ability to attract the best available men to both the student body and faculty. That drive for undergraduate quality, begun with the National Scholarships in 1936, now faces a $10 roadblock. The administration has yet to show that it has sufficient reasons for bringing departmental solvency into an area that has always been purposely insolvent.

Early estimates are that such a fee will discourage only ten percent of total applications, but it will do so in the very areas which Harvard has worked hardest to cultivate. Harvard Club officials in the West and South have already indicated strong disapproval of the plan. They expect difficulty in explaining such a fee to prospective applicants not yet convinced that Harvard is their choice.

Harvard's budget did not finish so far in the black that it cannot use these additional funds. But it is difficult to imagine another department of the University that could better spend the money now allocated to it. It is even more serious to consider jeopardizing the worth of a $650,000 scholarship program to save one-twentieth of that amount.

In order to continue to attract a highly qualified undergraduate body and protect its scholarship program, the administration should maintain its present policy. Yale, however, which has pushed the plan, insists that Harvard and Princeton go along. Operating under a million dollar deficit and an admissions policy that draws 60 percent of its undergraduates from preparatory schools, Yale expects to benefit from the fees. Harvard is neither plagued by so serious deficit worries nor committed to a 60-40 ratio.

Big Three cooperation is of negative importance when it must come as a disadvantage to one of the members. Harvard stands to gain greatly by holding to an independent position. A refusal to go along with the fee will undoubtedly strengthen the University in those-very areas that it is trying to cultivate. The administration should recognize the inconsistency of adopting such a program and refuse to sacrifice its own policies for the call of Big Three unity.