Preparation, the "sure thing" versus the risk, is causing much of the grief in admissions circles today. For one thing, an unerring relationship between academic ability and the ability to score well on College Board Tests has never been satisfactorily established. The Predicted Rank List, which tries to sum up ability and motivation, is by no means infallibile, since Group IV PRL entrants have gone on to receive Magnas, and vice versa. Although an applicant will probably never stand or fall on Predicted Rank List alone, the trend is to lop off applicants on the very lowest range of ability. Five or six years ago, the average Harvard student was in the top 5 per cent of the nation's college group, now he is in the top 3 per cent. Ten per cent of the class of '58 scored below 507 on the College Board SAT's; this percentile score was raised to 530 in the class of '61.

While Board scores have gone up all along the line, they will probably not rise too much higher. It will be far in the future when Harvard will refuse the 550 boy with outstanding achievement in other areas.

But the predicted rank list and the test scores are an accurate measure of academic ability, they do not exist in a vacuum. They are even less 'fair' measures of basic intelligence than an I.Q. test. Richard King emphasizes the fact that "performance in school, on tests, in activities is directly related to the socio-economic status of parents." Thus, as Harvard gets more selective, the applicant from the depressed area gets passed over. Not only is the poor boy not likely to apply, King points out, but he is not likely to compete well "on paper" with his richer, better-fed rival. Education, like charity, begins in the home.

At the same time as the lower-in-come boy lags behind in the race, the alumni son looms stronger and stronger. Chances are he doesn't need a very large scholarship, if any at all, and he has probably been very well prepared. A study of Ivy League alumni sons made recently points out that 80 to 90 percent of this group goes to prep school. In recent years, the policy has been to give the Harvard son "the benefit of the doubt" in border-line cases. But as this group grows in numbers, decisions will become more difficult.

Alumni Sons, Large Group

In his 1956-57 report, Dean Bender commented on the large (19 per cent) number of Harvard sons in the Class of '61. "Clearly considerable weight has been placed on Harvard parentage by the Admissions Committee, more weight than some will think is proper.... The fact is that the Harvard-son group is, academically at least, somewhat less able than the admissible candidate group as a whole, so that preference given to Harvard sons is greater than would appear from the above figures."

But if the group as a whole is less able, it is often because alumni are the least realistic about their sons' chances for admission, and burden the Harvard admissions committee with applications which have been filed over the protests of the school's guidance officer. "We try to be good to Harvard," says Wesley G. Spencer at Brown and Nichols, "We're not always successful. There are always some alumni who think they have an inside track with the admissions committee and will apply anyway."

Harvard Sons Preference?

At this stage, Harvard can reject those Harvard sons who "don't measure up" in good conscience, hoping that an alumnus will not take the blow too severely. But Harvard sons are going to apply in increasing numbers, and they will be smart and well-prepared. How does an admissions Committee which "gives the benefit of the doubt" now turn down alumni sons in the future, not on the basis that they are not good enough, but that someone else is better or more deserving.

Professor Stouffer, who is as loyal to the poorly-off boy as anyone on the Committee, nonetheless feels that "if a Harvard son is reasonably good, we ought to take him." Stouffer and others believe that the spaces created by future College expansion ought to be filled, first of all, by the qualified alumnus' son.

One simple answer to the problem of preparation lies in standardized secondary schooling--those schools which fail to meet the minimum standards imposed by Ivy League colleges simply are not considered at admissions time. President Emeritus Conant has been a strong advocate of this "pull the high schools up by our bootstraps" theory of admissions, despite the danger of leaving the the small town high school irrevocably behind.

There is, at present, a certain amount of pressure from the faculty to raise standards of preparation in mathematics and foreign languages and thereby eliminate a certain amount of elementary instruction in the first years of college. But Harvard would probably continue to take boys with relatively poor high school backgrounds. Saving the reasons for the "risk" in admissions until later, it is interesting to observe how successfully the College has managed to assimilate the Westerner with algebra and plane geometry on his record without slowing up the Exonian who has had a year of advanced calculus. Most of the credit goes to the Advanced Standing Program.