No Formula for 'Cliffe Admissions

She has straight 700's on her Scholastic Aptitude and English Achievement Tests she ranks in the top tenth of her high school or prep school class; principal and teachers alike detect 'no' flaw in her brains, character, and personality; her interviewer finds her alert and eager, chock-full of intellectual curiosity. By objective standards, she will profit immensely from and contribute greatly to any college in the country. But will she get into Radcliffe? Not necessarily, for an average of 1,000 equally well qualified girls have applied for the last three years--and Radcliffe has space for only 280 to 300 freshmen.

In part, the flood of applications that pours into the Admissions Office in Fay House reflects a national trend. Anyone who daily or even weekly sicks through the pages of a newspaper can hardly avoid knowing that more and more, and increasingly better-prepared, secondary school students are setting their sights on the best colleges. But even among the Eastern prestige schools, Radcliffe's situation is unique. As David Riesman puts it, "Radcliffe's image has undisputed hegemony. Most really bright girls want to come here: it's heaven and boys, too." Applications mount eight to ten per cent yearly: the 279 freshmen in the Class of 1984 were culled from a field of approximately 1,800. With most of the 1,000 secondary schools which now send in applicants carefully winnowing away the chaff, more than half of the total are girls with much to offer and much to gain.

Admissions procedures have become incredibly complicated. The stairway to intellectual paradise is blocked with piles of papers, covered with statistics and words, words, words. National Merit test scores (used to distinguish the brilliant student from the merely superior one) go into each girl's folder along with College Entrance Examination Board scores. Numerous reports and transcripts attempt to reveal the full picture of the applicant's secondary school record and personal background. Her principal and two teachers of her own choice write recommendations--often so hazy and meaningless that the Committee on Admissions must request further information. A detailed discussion of the personal interview provides an additional perspective on the candidate. Finally, each girl this year will write a statement assessing her own qualifications.

In the past, every members of the Committee on Admissions read each candidate's folder. Next year, however, the Committee (currently Mrs. Phillips Farrington, acting Director; and Associate Director; Deans Eliott, Williston, and Sherman; the Director of Financial Aid; and President Bunting) will divide up the applications into small groups, each to be assessed by one member. The change is designed to save time; it also suggests that the Committee wonders whether recent applications have been read with sufficient care.

Shuffling through the stacks of objective and subjective evaluations, Committee members make a weary but dedicated effort to distinguish rubies in the rough from well-polished glass. "There is no formula," stresses acting Director Farrington. "The ideal Radcliffe girl is really many people," adds Dean Elliott. Academic promise, intellectual curiosity, individual motivation, and social maturity--these are the four qualities The Radcliffe Girl must demonstrate. But how she does so is strictly up to her. The Committee on Admissions has few, if any, suggestions beyond the obvious or the vague.

The current endeavor to surround the admissions process with an aura of mystery is probably a defense mechanism on the part of a Committee harassed by applicants, parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and principals to define what the College is "looking for." Such a definition could quickly become extraordinarily limiting for a school which wants to remain flexible enough to identify, attract, and reward many forms of promise. Applicants already do their best to fit into what they consider the required mold, curtailing spontaneous intellectual griwth and activity. But if the Committee is now showing a Yankee sort of wisdom in keeping most of its opinions to itself, in the past it was more outspoken.

Way back in 1946--the same year, incidentally, that Harvard Provost Paul Buck reported "a paucity of applicants of the kind we most desire"--Radcliffe President Wilbur K. Jordan foresaw in the steadily rising number of applications a real cause for concern. This, in '46, when Radcliffe received perhaps only one-fourth as many applicants as it does now for a freshman class virtually the same size: "'The very wealth of the applications from which we could draw raises, indeed, a subtle threat to education in a free society. Though we employed every device known to assist us in selecting the ... young women best fitted for education at the hands of this great faculty, it must none the less be confessed that the Admissions Committee is moved by intangibles and is influenced by very inexact criteria.

"This is true because no test can be devised to measure the potentialities of promise in any human being of 17 years. It would have been so easy this year to have admitted and apparently riskless class all from expensive and excellent private schools, all from families of abundant means who would not have called upon our scholarship resources, and all with the 'rough edges of manners' polished off. But such a policy would have betrayed our trust and would have weakened the restless vitality which characterizes any great institution of learning.

"We tried, perhaps not very efficiently, to secure a freshman class that was well-balanced geographically and socially; we took deliberate risks on young women whose preparation had been inadequate but in whose record there was a compelling hint of strength; and we admitted a considerable number with only middling academic records when we were persuaded that these students might thirty years hence be outstanding women in their homes and in their communities. These problems have caused us to face issues which lie at the very heart of the educational process and we hope during the coming year to study in detail our admissions procedure and try to define more satisfactorily our philosophy of admissions."

No member of the Committee was ever again to be so frank about the seemingly insurmountable problems its faces. Constance Ballou, Director of Admissions during the crucial years from 1954 through 1959, tried to clarify Radcliffe's standards without constructing specific patterns of required performance or potential. She stressed the importance of a strong academic background, cautioning applicants to take "life-adjustment" courses only in addition to, not in place of, scholastic course."

"I as least have come increasingly to distrust the beautifully precise examination scores--drawn out to a thousandth of a per cent--which I think do violence to the complexity of knowledge and the mystery of character," wrote President Jordan in 1943. Miss Ballou, if she did not wholly share his skepticism, put it partially into practice. On the College Boards, she emphasized, "We do not expect the same performance from all candidates ... we 'think down' the scores of those girls whose schools have primed them for this variety of test-taking. Conversely, we 'think up' the results achieved by girls for whom these tests represent a new and unprecedented experience."

Jordan's attitude toward objective tests still affects admissions policy. This year for the first time the College has issued a profile of the entering freshman class; the most interesting thing about the statistics is that they back up the Committee's contention that high scores do not guarantee acceptance. Three per cent of the total number of candidates produced verbal scores in the 750-800 range; of this group only 65 per cent were offered admission. The statistical situation is almost identical for the mathematical aptitude test. A little more than 14 per cent of the total applicants scored better than 750 on the English Achievement Test; of these students only 55 per cent were accepted.

Not incidentally, the median scores of successful applicants are somewhat lower than popular conjecture has placed them. Although the College does not give out the medians as such, the application of a slide rule to the percentages provided producers the following "educated guesses": SAT verbal--695, SAT math--660, English Achievement--725. Nevertheless, test scores weigh heavily enough that the Committee places them at the back of each applicant's folder--where the reader will not see them until she has already formed a partial picture of the candidate in question. Moreover, the Committee is currently trying to arrive at a formula evaluating SAT scores, achievement tests, and rank in secondary school class to project a freshman average for each applicant. When the formula is obtained, it is plain that predicted Rank List will join the other "vital statistics" in the back of the candidate's folder.

Extra-curricular activities have only a secondary effect on an applicant's chances. Dean Elliott finds them significant only insofar as they indicate social awareness and "liveliness of mind." Miss Ballou reported in 1957 that, "Nearly half the freshman class have been editors of yearbooks and newspapers. Many have been presidents of class or student government." But, she hastened to add, "Important and valuable as these expy to have, as we do in the incoming freshman class, a girl who has raised sheep, another who picked berries to earn money for college, several who worked in laboratories, one who organized a string quartet, the winner of the General Mills Homemaking Award, and a girl who studied physics outside of school on her own and passed a Regents Examination with honor."

On the question of emotional stability, Miss Ballou outlined Radcliffe's attitude: "We do not want, nor could we cope with, a community of psychiatric risks. Brilliance, if irresponsible, does not guarantee admission. On the other hand, there are those in this year's class of whom it may be said, as one teacher of a girl, 'She flies off the handle easily, but is learning to master this failing and of late shows marked improvement in handling her own emotions.'" Mrs. Farrington puts it more bluntly. "Of course we want well-balanced people. But some of the most able are not well-balanced. This is a chance we have to take. If we're sure a girl is going to have a break-down, it is no kindness to her or the college or scholarship to accept her. But if she has a chance, she may be one of the most exciting students we get."

In the past, there has been some dispute over the relationship between Harvard and Radcliffe admissions policies. Dean Elliott points out that the Committees have always functioned separately, "without much communication between the two groups."

But the college's raison d'etre from the beginning has been to provide a Harvard education for women. Its greatest drawing card--even during the forties when the insular women's college flourished--has been the combined attraction of the Harvard facilities, Faculty, and student body. Although Miss Ballou occasionally expressed doubts about the kind of girl who prefers co-education, most members of the Committee on Admissions have accepted the inevitable truth that the girls want to be where the boys are.

President Bunting stresses that Radcliffe students "ought to be people that Harvard wants here. The Harvard Faculty should be more insion of transfer students. Ten years volved in our admissions process. It should have more to say about our basic admissions policy." Past attempts to add a Faculty member or two to the Committee on Admissions have ended in failure, but Mrs. Bunting intends to try again.

The rising tide of applications has had a direct effect on the admisperiences are, we are just as hap-ago Radcliffe accepted 25 such applicants; this year only nine were admitted. The shortage of housing space--a perennial problem since the Second World War--leaves the College with just barely enough room for the freshman class and makes a substantial number of transfers unthinkable. Describing the dilemma in 1958, Jordan declared that "fully ten per cent of the places in this college belong as of academic right" to transfer applicants who wish to major in esoteric subjects not taught elsewhere or to use expensive equipment unavailable at other colleges. He did not, however, mention a third reason now considered thoroughly respectable by the Committee on Admissions--marriage to a Harvard undergraduate after one or two years at college.

During Jordan's reign, the College at times took an almost irritating attitude of noblesse oblige. Radcliffe officials privately and publicly bemoaned the fate of qualified but rejected applicants doomed to educational mediocrity beyond the charmed circle of the Eastern syndrom. But by the late fifties, this attitude was gone for good. Pointing to a "serious crisis" in admissions policy, Jordan flatly declared, "Far too many students are applying to relatively few colleges." Only a week ago, President Bunting echoed his sentiments: "I am not convinced that Radcliffe is the only college in the world." The quantity of applications has forced Radcliffe into the unusual situation of beating the gong for other excellent liberal arts schools across the country.

And this raises a further problem, for Radcliffe, obviously, has a vested interest in siphoning off the best of the best. It isn't as easy as it sounds. For one thing, as Mrs. Farrington points out, the very brilliance of Radcliffe's image tends to scare away some of the people the College would like to attract. Though Committee members say they no longer worry about geographical, social, and economic distribution, Radcliffe remains an essentially Eastern, upper-class College. The majority of the applicants come from the New England and middle Atlantic states; the College still fills nearly 25 per cent of each class with Massachusetts residents. A survey of the educational backgrounds and occupations of the fathers of the 294 freshmen admitted to the Class of 1960 revealed that 247 possessed bachelor's degrees, 137 of them advanced degrees. One hundred7MRS. PHILLIPS FARRINGTON, Acting Director of Admissions