Application Joins Common Herd

The Harvard application, the College gatekeeper that shut out hundreds of valedictorians, athletic stars and musical prodigies, died this summer.

Used to screen students for admission to the College for decades, the application will be replaced with the common application, making Harvard the first Ivy League school to accept the form.

Instead of the approximately 15-question application past applicants completed, the common application contains a set of standard questions that are accepted by more than 130 colleges such as Amherst and Williams. Harvard will require candidates to answer supplementary questions as well.

The application fee will not be affected by the change, according to admissions officials.

Director of Admission Marilyn McGrath Lewis '70 says the office eliminated the individual application to cut down the time students spend on applications.

Using the new application will also attract a broader and more diverse candidate pool, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons '67 says.

"We are leveling the playing fields," he says.

The common application is available free of charge on computer disks. The College will continue to require applicants to submit a printed copy of the application.

Fitzsimmons says Harvard did not move to the common form to draw more applications, and he doesn't anticipate a large increase.

"People made similar remarks when we allowed the ACT as a supplement to the SATs," Fitzsimmons says. "If we wanted to increase the numbers, we could just send a search letter out to more people."

Trendsetting

Though Harvard was a trendsetter among its Ivy League counterparts in adopting the common application, few Ivies are now considering changing their forms.

Dartmouth followed suit late this summer, saying it will accept the common application as well as its own in the fall of 1995.

Yale director of admissions Margit Dahl says the New Haven school will examine Harvard's experience this year.

"It's an interesting thing to consider," she says. "I am sure it will come up at the meeting of the Ivy [admission] deans."

Karl Furstenberg, Dartmouth's director of admissions and financial aid, says Harvard's decision influenced Dartmouth, though Dartmouth had also been considering the common application.

But he says Dartmouth will continue using its old application because "you say a lot about how you make admissions decisions by the questions that you ask."

Using the standard form will "reintroduce equity into the admissions process," Furstenberg said.

"The college admissions process has become one in which people who are affluent have lots of resources, prep courses, access to electronic applications," he says. "To me the common application removes some of that," he says.

Officials at Cornell, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania said they are not considering accepting the common application.

Lee J. Stetson Jr., dean of admissions at U. Penn., told the Dartmouth student newspaper that the common application is "a shallow way of reaching people" who do not want to complete multiple forms.

An administrative assistant at Brown who asked for anonymity says, "We have many questions about the common application. We have a copy of it. We have no idea when we would implement it."

Princeton dean of admissions Fred Hargadon did not return telephone calls.

The Old Form's Legacy

The adoption of the new application sounds the death knell for the Harvard application, but the old form lives on in the memories of administrators, professors and students who remember filling it out.

Some, such as Thomas A. Dingman '67, assistant dean of the College, remember their essays vividly.

"It was about a summer job I had, as an instructor at a tennis club, and how there was a particular student who made my work difficult by demanding attention," he said. "As a 16-year-old, I remember trying to work around it, and as I did, I became more understanding about people who are difficult or abnormal."

But perhaps some don't remember it at all. More than one administrator told The Crimson that Seamus P. Malin '62, director of the international office, did not complete an application at all.

"He didn't know you had to apply, and just showed up," one administrator says.

Malin denies the rumor.

"This great myth of my application has been enjoyed over the cocktail circuit over the past years," says Malin, who is originally from Ireland. "I did apply, just past the deadline."

When pressed, he says he applied sometime in the summer, explaining that Harvard was more of a regional college in the 1950s and had more flexibility in boosting the number of its matriculators after the deadline.

Though the College has changed through the years, the admission application has remained surprisingly constant.

"It hasn't really changed according to any pattern," says L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of the college, who was dean of admissions and financial aid from 1972 and 1985.

"The essay question has always been the product of internal decisions by the admissions committee," Jewett says, "but with no particular trend--things have been tried and then given up, and then sometimes we came back to them."

The "directory" questions concerning addresses, parents, siblings and test scores have also stayed more or less the same in recent decades.

Questions about the race and religion of applicants, a hotly debated topic in bygone days, have been dictated by state and federal laws in recent years.

"In the 1960s and early 70s, Massachusetts law said any questions about race or religion had to be precluded," Jewett says.

But that was superseded when federal laws requiring the College to keep affirmative action information took effect, and the college included optional questions that helped it maintain statistics.

Malin, who sat on the admissions committee from 1965 to 1987, agrees that the Harvard application mostly stayed the same, until now.

"The introduction of the computer to help order applications meant we put a preliminary application page into effect, but there was nothing comparable to the impact of the common application," he says

But he says Dartmouth will continue using its old application because "you say a lot about how you make admissions decisions by the questions that you ask."

Using the standard form will "reintroduce equity into the admissions process," Furstenberg said.

"The college admissions process has become one in which people who are affluent have lots of resources, prep courses, access to electronic applications," he says. "To me the common application removes some of that," he says.

Officials at Cornell, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania said they are not considering accepting the common application.

Lee J. Stetson Jr., dean of admissions at U. Penn., told the Dartmouth student newspaper that the common application is "a shallow way of reaching people" who do not want to complete multiple forms.

An administrative assistant at Brown who asked for anonymity says, "We have many questions about the common application. We have a copy of it. We have no idea when we would implement it."

Princeton dean of admissions Fred Hargadon did not return telephone calls.

The Old Form's Legacy

The adoption of the new application sounds the death knell for the Harvard application, but the old form lives on in the memories of administrators, professors and students who remember filling it out.

Some, such as Thomas A. Dingman '67, assistant dean of the College, remember their essays vividly.

"It was about a summer job I had, as an instructor at a tennis club, and how there was a particular student who made my work difficult by demanding attention," he said. "As a 16-year-old, I remember trying to work around it, and as I did, I became more understanding about people who are difficult or abnormal."

But perhaps some don't remember it at all. More than one administrator told The Crimson that Seamus P. Malin '62, director of the international office, did not complete an application at all.

"He didn't know you had to apply, and just showed up," one administrator says.

Malin denies the rumor.

"This great myth of my application has been enjoyed over the cocktail circuit over the past years," says Malin, who is originally from Ireland. "I did apply, just past the deadline."

When pressed, he says he applied sometime in the summer, explaining that Harvard was more of a regional college in the 1950s and had more flexibility in boosting the number of its matriculators after the deadline.

Though the College has changed through the years, the admission application has remained surprisingly constant.

"It hasn't really changed according to any pattern," says L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of the college, who was dean of admissions and financial aid from 1972 and 1985.

"The essay question has always been the product of internal decisions by the admissions committee," Jewett says, "but with no particular trend--things have been tried and then given up, and then sometimes we came back to them."

The "directory" questions concerning addresses, parents, siblings and test scores have also stayed more or less the same in recent decades.

Questions about the race and religion of applicants, a hotly debated topic in bygone days, have been dictated by state and federal laws in recent years.

"In the 1960s and early 70s, Massachusetts law said any questions about race or religion had to be precluded," Jewett says.

But that was superseded when federal laws requiring the College to keep affirmative action information took effect, and the college included optional questions that helped it maintain statistics.

Malin, who sat on the admissions committee from 1965 to 1987, agrees that the Harvard application mostly stayed the same, until now.

"The introduction of the computer to help order applications meant we put a preliminary application page into effect, but there was nothing comparable to the impact of the common application," he says