College Enrollment Might Increase Next Year If Tradition Maintained

Despite Dean Bender's hope that the freshman class will be smaller next year, if nearly a century of tradition is observed, the College's enrollment next year should increase by almost 50 men.

The continual enrollment increase is one of the main points of emphasis in "Notes on Harvard College: Graphic and Statistical," a booklet prepared by David W. Bailey, secretary to the Corporation.

President Pusey made this pamphlet available to the Faculty to show "that pressure from increasing population has exerted a consistent influence on Harvard and that we must now expect this to become greatly intensified."

The booklet also shows that since 1885 the College has been accommodating an ever smaller percentage of the country's college students. This has occurred because both the college-age population and the percentage of it attending college has risen at a much faster rate than the College's enrollment.

Thus, in 1885 the College had 15.3 out of every thousand college students in the country, but only 0.5 per thousand in 1945. In the last decade, however, the number has risen to 1.9 in 1950 and 2.2 in 1955. In the last, possibly portentous of the College's continuing to hold an increasing share of the nation's college candidates.

Dean's List Grows

A possible effect of this increasing selectivity of admissions has been the concurrent growth of the Dean's List. But actually the booklet shows that most of this growth dates from 1930. In that year, 21.0 percent of the College made one of the first three rank groups, a figure that rose to 31.8 in 1941 and 39.4 percent in 1952. Last year it dropped to 37.6 percent. The growth in the List has been most apparent in Groups II and III, with unsatisfactory records and Group I remaining fairly stable.

A comparison of spring 1954 academic records in five extra-curricular activities showed that CRIMSON executives had the highest percent on Dean's List, followed by the Student Council, the Glee Club, the varsity and JV crews and the football team. The 53-8 percent of CRIMSON executives on the Dean's List also topped the records made by the Corporation, Overseers and alumni directors in their junior years in the College