Applications for GSAS Now Due by December 1

Students who plan to attend the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences next year will have to file their applications by December 1 instead of the former January 10 deadline.

The change of date was prompted by an expected increase in the number of applicants, John P. Elder, Dean of the GSAS, said. With the children of the post-war baby-boom now reaching graduate school and the increased percentage of students who go on to graduate study, Elder anticipates some 6000 applications for the 900-odd places available next Fall. This is an increase of some 500 over the current figure.

Elder believes the earlier date will give students a "fairer deal." "There is no simple system to graduate school admission, he said. "Graduate work is essentially an apprentice system, and the professors need time to choose their applicants with care."

Every time a student applies to the GSAS, the admissions office there receives at least ten pieces of paper which are sorted, collated, graded "scholarship material," "obviously accep table," or "below graduate school standards," and then passed on to the departments for decision.

By moving the deadline to December 1, it is expected that the departments will have the material by the first week in February--giving them time to consider each case before March 21, when, by agreement with similar graduate schools throughout the country, all scholarships must be announced.

No Handicap

Prospective students will not find the earlier filing date a handicap, he said, since many of the better ones "now begin to think about their graduate school applications at the end of the junior college year." He stressed that letters of recommendation will be accepted as late as February 1; and students are urged to send in their first-term senior grades as soon as they receive them.

Admissions officers at the Medical School, Law School, and School of Education indicated last week that they had no plans to revise the various applications, deadlines. "We don't see signs of any sharp increase in the number of applications," Russell A. Simpson, director of Admissions at the Law School said. "Even if we did, we probably wouldn't want to push a student to make a decision he may regret later in the year."

Simpson noted that applications to the Law School had leveled off last year at around 3000. In each of the three years before that, the number went up by 360.