Administration Cuts Size Of Harvard Class of '78

The administration will cut the size of the next freshman class by 50 resident men in an attempt to hold overcrowding next year at or below the levels reached last fall.

The one-year decrease is substantially smaller than that recommended in early December by the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life, which proposed a reduction next year of 100 resident men.

The smaller Harvard class and the unchanged number of Radcliffe students will combine to form the first combined class with a male-female ratio below 2.5-to-1.

Harvard's Class of 1978 will include only 1100 resident men and a drop from 25 commuters to 15, L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, said yesterday.

Radcliffe's freshman class next year will be about the same size as this year's class--450 resident women and 25 commuters--Alberta S. Arthurs, dean of Radcliffe Admissions, said last night. She added that the number of transfers Radcliffe will admit is still undetermined.

Evaluate Next Year

Next year the administration will evaluate the effects of the cut and study the status of the housing situation before deciding whether to continue the decrease for a second year, Dean Rosovsky said yesterday.

In its December meeting, the CHUL recommended a two-year reduction in the size of the incoming male class.

The class-size decrease is intended to prevent next year's overcrowding from exceeding that which crunched the college this fall, Bruce Collier, research associate for the Office of Tests, said yesterday.

Although President Bok's 2.5-to-1 plan projected a total addition of 300 students in four years, the college has been moving toward an increase almost twice that large, Collier said. He added that this overflow came in large part from the admission of forced commuters into the housing system.

One University Hall official said yesterday that the inflated increase had resulted from poor coordination between the admissions office and the administration.

Another member of the administration said earlier in the academic year that the admissions offices often used the forced commuter designation to admit applicants whom they wanted to accept although they had attained the established class size.

Arthurs and Jewett both said yesterday that next year's transfers will be explicitly told they have very low priority in the housing pool. Arthurs said her office would "look with more care at the nonresident pool" of applicants and "won't admit [as forced transfers] local people who would prefer to live on campus."

Arthurs said Radcliffe will admit approximately the same number of women this year as it did last year, when it took 653. Harvard will reduce its pool of accepted students from last year's 1445 last year to between 1350 and 1400, Jewett said