Of course no one can say with certainty how many students will want to come to Harvard fifteen years from now, but I would be surprised if we had then more than 5,000 bona fide first choice candidates with academic ability and personal qualities of the sort we were really interested in. Harvard's concern, as said, is with the top 5 per cent, which will mean probably about 200,000 students of the 18 year old group by the end of the 1960's. Of these more than half will be either girls or interested primarily in technical or vocational education or will not go to college so that the potential Harvard national clientele will be about 75,000. In view of the scores of other good colleges in the country it seems unlikely that more than 5,000 will want Harvard. Five thousand would be considerably more than twice our present number of candidates of this sort. We would no doubt have many more applications filed, however, because of the multiple application practice, perhaps as many as 10-15,000.

Clearly we would be forced to deny admission to hundreds of able boys (we shall have to do this in any case, even if we double the size of the College) but I am sure that none of the rejected candidates whom we would really like to be able to take would fall to secure admission to some other respectable college. Rejection by Harvard would not mean denial of educational opportunity to them.

Selection, not Snobbery

Five thousand may turn out to be too big or too small, but it seems to me a reasonable if generous estimate of the number of bona fide first-choice candidates of top quality we would be likely to get at the peak of the tidal wave. I emphasize it because I feel that the astronomical figures of total college enrollment which have been used so loosely have obscured the scope and nature of Harvard's problem and it is desirable to try to define as concretely as possible the magnitude of the pressure we will face. . .

Harvard is not being superior or looking down its nose at others when it defines its special role as giving the most challenging, stretching and enriching education it can to a limited number of academically highly able students. This is what we are peculiarly fitted to do, and it is important for the nation that it be done well, that the men in this group, who are going to be the future scholars, scientists, teachers, government officials, top professional men and managers, get the kind of education they need and we can give them. Our job is to give them the best possible education for the special service they will give to society later. We are not competent to do what a Junior College, for instance, can do. And the great majority of the college students of the future will not want what Harvard has to offer and would be confused and frustrated by it. . .

An Easier Teaching Job

Harvard's job was a lot simpler in some ways in the old days when the gentleman 'C' student, here for four pleasant years, was so common a type. In the Twenties, when the number on the Dean's List averaged under 20 per cent, the faculty could, if it wished, ignore a large proportion of its students. Now we find last year's Freshman class with 40 per cent on the Dean's List and we are approaching the time when 50 per cent of the College will be on the Dean's List and 60-70 per cent will be honors candidates. How will we respond to the challenge of a student body of this quality? It is one of the anomalies of Harvard history that it was in Mr. Lowell's presidency, when the student body was much less able and academically highly motivated than now, that the vigorous and imaginative efforts were made to provide a challenging, individualized education for all students through the development of tu- torial instruction, general examinations and the Houses, whereas now we are contemplating expansion which, in my view, would almost certainly move us in the opposite direction. This is, of course, the heart of the problem, and if it can be proved that we can expand and still give a student body of the quality of ours the quality of education it deserves, then the argument is over.

Basic to the question of quality of education is the faculty. One of the weakest spots in Harvard education today in the high proportion of undergraduate teaching done by Teaching Follows. I am not indicting Teaching Follows as a group. Some of them are doing a first rate job and all are gaining useful experience. But they are very uneven in quality, they got little help or supervision from their seniors and they are, by definition, inexperienced. We must face the fact that our heavy reliance on them means a watering down of the quality of Harvard instruction. Yet largely because of the expansion in size over the pre-war College which has already occurred we are using them much more extensively than before. Table 7 in the Notes on Harvard College offers illuminating evidence on this. If we add a thousand or more undergraduates we shall inevitably have to use Teaching Fellows even more extensively, with a further decline in the quality of instruction.

A Seller's Market

But in the years ahead it will almost certainly be impossible to maintain even the present uneven quality of Teaching Fellows. In the next fifteen years there will be a terrific shortage of college teachers. It will be a seller's market for them and anyone who meets even the minimum qualifications for teaching at Harvard will have better offers elsewhere. Just as serious, for the same reason it will be far more difficult than at present to keep the best and most experienced of our junior faculty, the Instructors and Assistant Professors. Who then will staff our Sections and provide tutorial instruction and man the Houses and teach elementary language courses and General Education A?

It is possible that adequate teachers, of Harvard quality, can be found but it will be expensive. Which raises the important question of how much expansion would cost and where the money would come from. First, however, we must face realistically the question of how much is needed just to maintain Harvard quality for the present sized Harvard.

The unhappy fact is that whereas the expansion in size of the College which took place under President Lowell was accompanied by a tremendous building program and by a large expansion in endowment in a period of a reasonably stable dollar, there has been very little building to accompany the expansion in numbers since the early 1930's and while the endowment has grown inflation has cut its value. There are therefore, great arrearages to make up if we are to do a first rate job with a student body of 4,400. This fact is illustrated dramatically by our present housing situation. . .

Even Athletics Need Money

Before we do any expanding we need money to build two Houses and more Freshman dormitories. We need housing for married students and younger faculty. We need a new infirmary and medical building, a theatre, more chemistry laboratories, more office space for administration and faculty. More important, we need to raise faculty salaries at least 25 per cent if our teachers are to reach pre-war levels of compensation or to lesson the compensation gap between academic and other professions. Every department has more or less pressing needs which require new endowment. The recent report on the behavioral sciences at Harvard describes some of the urgent needs in that areas. We need new endowment for athletic program, which used to pay its way and now costs over half a million a year, for the library, for the Fogg, for tutorial instruction and advising, for scholarships, for the Houses.

In other words, we need, conservatively, something between fifty and seventy-five million dollars for new buildings and new endowment just to do our present job properly. Remember that with inflation the endowment dollar has steadily lost in real value and that the percentage of the cost of a Harvard education paid for by the student instead of by endowment income has steadily increased. We are relatively considerably poorer than we were thirty years ago and there is, I believe, a significant relationship in the long haul between the quality of education and real per captia endowment income. Adding more students without increasing endowment proportionately would, of course, lesson still further the percapita endowment. It would be possible, by increasing the tuition charge to $2,000 a year, or thereabouts, to make up for shrinking endowment values. This would mean a college made up of the very bright, on scholarships, and the very rich. If there are enough of the very rich who want Harvard, say 75 per cent of the enrollment, this is one possible solution.