Admissions To Mail Letter 5 Days Early

Aspiring candidates to the Class of 1989 will be relieved of five days of hand-wringing, fingernail-biting and mailman-houding because admission notification letters will this year be mailed out almost a week earlier than usual.

Approximately 11,500 acceptance and rejection letters will be mailed on April 9 this year instead of the traditional April 14, Dean of Admissions L. Fred Jewett '57 said yesterday.

All eight Ivy League schools agreed to the mailing date change after a request last summer by the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) to provide admitted students with more time to select the college of their choice.

Composed of admissions and financial aid officers from colleges around the country, COFHE decided that "it would be nice for all colleges to more their notification date as close to April I as possible to allow students a longer time to explore their options," said Willis J. Stepson, Jr., dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mixed Reactions

"Not everyone was absolutely in favor of the decision," said Laura G. Fisher '69, who will replace William R. Fitzsimmons '67 as director of admissions at Harvard effective May 1.

"The pressures were intense," Jewett said. "It was tight, and it involved working a few more evenings than usual. We really had to crack the whip, but it was possible," he added.

Richard D. Jaeger, director of admissions at Dartmouth College, said that because of the new mailing date officials there "wer not able to do the fine tuning and screening" of admission candidates they had done in past years. "We are really feeling the crunch this year" he added.

Jaeger said ther another purpose of moving the notification date forward was "to avoid long waiting lists going late into the summer."

"We did streamline some of the minor facets of our evaluation process," said James T. Mc-Menamin, director of admissions at Columbia University. "This was only with respect to obvious candidates for admission and denial. The middle 70 percent still got the same treatment," he said.

Worth David, dean of admissions at Yale University, said that the new deadline for admissions officers "was a problem but was not a problem," adding "We know well-enough in advance, so we were able to manage things pretty well."

Jewett said that COFHE actually requested an April I notification date, in order to give prospective students a full month before the May I deadline to make up their minds.

"Students still hover around the January I deadline in submitting their applications," Jewett said, making the April I goal nearly impossible. "We agreed to move the date up but made no commitment to the first of the month-April 10 was a compromise," he said.

McMenamin agreed, saying that although the notification date will always be earlier than April 15, the Ivy League schools are all in agreement that the time needed to complete financial aid calculations makes an April I deadline impossible.

Stanford University's notification date has been April 1 for several years now, said Keith N. Light, assistant director of admissions there, adding they will "hold their ground with that date."

"Because it takes as many as four days fo the letters to get to students on the east coast, we feel that the few extra days are necessary," Light added.

Mailing dates for Early Actions admission notification to Harvard are not affected by the date change according to Jewett