Harvard Law School Retracts Prerogative to Defer Entrance

The Law School admissions office dropped its one-year experiment this Fall which allowed a randomly-selected group of students to defer matriculation for up to three years.

Russell A. Simpson, associate dean of Law School Admissions, said yesterday that the option which was offered to one out of every four Law School students admitted last Spring will not be available to this year's entering class due to a lack of student interest.

He said the admissions committee did not offer the option to the entire class in order to insure against the possibility that everyone might choose to defer admission.

Sixty per cent of the group chosen decided to enter in the year of their admission while about 40 per cent decided to defer entrance, Simpson said. However, he said that the total number of deferred students amounted to less than 10 percent of all students admitted that year.

Although the admissions committee will no longer promise a deferring student that he will be readmitted, it has in the past turned down very few students who have reapplied for admission after their leaves of absence, Simpson said. He said that "as the present policy stands, students who wish to defer are encouraged to do so."

Simpson said that this policy will remain unless students stage a large-scale demand for change.

The admissions committee tried the experiment last Spring because it was afraid that students may have felt an increased pressure to enter law school directly from college, Simpson said.

He said the purpose of the experiment was to determine whether or not there was enough demand among students for a break between college and law school to warrant a policy change.