It is a cliche that it's harder to get into Harvard than to stay in--a fact which is reflected in the amount of space devoted to admissions and financial aids in University Hall. What the applicant sees is rather unimposing; a secretary announces that Mr.------ is ready, he enters (with wise instructions to "have some intelligent questions ready for the interviewer"), and he is ushered into a small room where the interviewer may have ashtrays and paperwork scattered about his desk and crayon drawings by his daughter on the wall. They talk about hockey, or Hemingway, or Baroque, and everyone is relieved when the interview is over.

But the simplicity and informality of University 17 disguises the weight of concern and responsibility present in the offices of the Admissions and Scholarship Committee on the two floors above. Here decisions are made which will affect not only Harvard's student body, but the composition of other Ivy League colleges, and of public and private secondary schools across the nation.

For the most part, the admissions responsibility is one of control, of "keeping the lid on the pressure cooker" as one dean phrases it. There is general agreement about the kinds of students Harvard wants to come here, but the difficulty comes in preserving a balance of types, keeping serving a balance of types, keeping everyone financially afloat, and preserving the philosophy of "opportunity for all" which keeps Harvard a national college. It involves controlling the pressures of mounting applications, rising tuition, alumni fathers, and beefing up the football team.

First of all, there is the problem of numbers. Dean Wilbur J. Bender, Chairman of the Admissions and Scholarships Committee, is perhaps the most worried about this problem. He has seen the number of applications rise to around 4,500 this year and is concerned with the Committee's ability to measure "the subjective factor," creative intellectual ability, in applicants numbering perhaps 10,000. "It's a question of how much money the College can afford to spend on admissions," he says, "We are spending too much money now as it is and we are barely able to keep afloat."

Brave New Harvard?

If his admissions nightmare were to come true, Bender speculates various ways of narrowing down the field, each of them equally alarming. Harvard might decide to become a "New England College", concentrating its attention on the better prep schools and high schools, "letting Exeter do our geographical distribution for us." Or it could pick fifty reliable secondary schools throughout the country to supply students. Or it could ignore such things as "character" and "initiative" completely, sorting applications in an IBM machine in order to fill predetermined places.

But these "Brave New Harvard" concepts seem to exist, among other members of the staff, at least, not as realistic alternatives, but as the grotesque projections of certain alarming trends in present-day admissions procedure: the tendency to equate preparation with ability, to rely too heavily on College Board scores and Predicted Rank Lists, and to ignore certain geographic and economic areas of American life. It is not sheer numbers which worries them, but who is applying and whether or not Harvard should take him.

"I'm not convinced we're going to be deluged with applications," Wallace MacDonald of the Financial Aid Office says. "There are enough controlling factors to keep the numbers down. The schools are getting better at guidance, and alumni are doing a good job of counseling. It's the alumnous who bears the brunt of the rejection slip, and he is going to discourage anyone from applying who he thinks can't get in."

"And there's not nearly the chagrin in going to a second choice college there was fifteen years ago," MacDonald pointed out. "There are Harvard faculty with children in colleges they would barely have heard of a few years ago. In the prep schools, the Harvard reject goes off to a school slightly down the ladder along with some other Harvard rejects."

At a public school, there are two controlling factors acting independently of the guidance officer, who cannot discourage applications with the same severity that an independent school can. At Boston Latin School, for instance, Harvard's rising costs--coupled with the growing attractiveness of technical schools in the area--have acted to cut down the number of applications and acceptances. Formerly, Boston Latin sent over one hundred boys to Harvard. Acceptances dropped to sixty two years ago and to forty-five this year.

"Many of our boys come from homes in the lower income brackets," says Senior Counselor Joseph Hopkinson. "And even though awards to Boston Latin Students have been substantial, they feel that Harvard is out of the question for them."

Charges Narrow Field

That family income or interest in another type of school keeps certain highly intelligent boys from swelling the number of applicants, is a fact likely to produce mixed emotions in the heart of an admissions director. It makes his job easier, that is certain, and keeps the IBM wolf from the door. At the same time, it raises doubts about equality of opportunity in the nation and of the Ivy League college's role as a melting pot of income and geographical groups.

One of the most concerned about this problem is Richard King, Assistant Director of Admissions and Scholarships, who has mapped out, statistically, Harvard's journey toward the upper-income brackets. With college costs now at a level equal to 50 per cent of many lower-income bracket family incomes, a family has to place unusual value on a Harvard education to want to send a son here.

In an article in the College Board Review, King asks, "Have the financial arms of the CEEB colleges been pulling hidden talent from oblivion or have we just been lifting candidates from each other's back pockets?" King goes on to point out that by far the majority of scholarship applicants at Harvard and equivalent colleges are students who will go to college somewhere else if they are denied aid. "I would be reasonably certain," King writes, "that at no College Scholarship Service college do as many as half the scholarship winners come from the neediest half of our nation's population. I would even wager that at no CSS college do as many as half of the dollars spent for scholarships go to students from the neediest half of our population." And this despite the financial aid revolution of determining stipends by need rather than merit.