As non-veteran students came face to face with the first tuition bill of the term at registration, the man who flinched at the September 24 deadline was no rarity. Many undergraduates send their bills home; many others do not arrive in Cambridge with fully consummated financial plans. In either case, payment of the bill on time is inevitably inconvenient and occasionally impossible.

Alleviation of this condition would cause an administrative upheaval. A long standing rule of the Corporation that tuition must be paid in advance prevents the Bursar's Office from extending the deadline. Nor can the Bursar's Office send bills home before the term begins, as it must await information from the Registrar as to the precise amount of the bill, information which in many cases arrives barely in time for the bill to be crammed into the registration envelope.

A reasonably flexible enforcement of the deadline remains as the only solution. According to R. V. Perry, Bursar, such flexibility is possible for students who can satisfy the Bursar's Office of their inability to pay on time. Others probably will not be fined, if they pay within two or three days after the twenty-fourth.

As for the future, about the best students now in the University can do is to remember to arrive well-heeled at the beginning of each term. In the case of incoming Freshman classes, however, the Administration could eliminate much of the trouble by emphasizing in its pre-entrance correspondence, along with the importance of swimming fifty yards, the immediacy of the first term-bill.