In the past, there has been some dispute over the relationship between Harvard and Radcliffe admissions policies. Dean Elliott points out that the Committees have always functioned separately, "without much communication between the two groups."
But the college's raison d'etre from the beginning has been to provide a Harvard education for women. Its greatest drawing card--even during the forties when the insular women's college flourished--has been the combined attraction of the Harvard facilities, Faculty, and student body. Although Miss Ballou occasionally expressed doubts about the kind of girl who prefers co-education, most members of the Committee on Admissions have accepted the inevitable truth that the girls want to be where the boys are.
President Bunting stresses that Radcliffe students "ought to be people that Harvard wants here. The Harvard Faculty should be more insion of transfer students. Ten years volved in our admissions process. It should have more to say about our basic admissions policy." Past attempts to add a Faculty member or two to the Committee on Admissions have ended in failure, but Mrs. Bunting intends to try again.
The rising tide of applications has had a direct effect on the admisperiences are, we are just as hap-ago Radcliffe accepted 25 such applicants; this year only nine were admitted. The shortage of housing space--a perennial problem since the Second World War--leaves the College with just barely enough room for the freshman class and makes a substantial number of transfers unthinkable. Describing the dilemma in 1958, Jordan declared that "fully ten per cent of the places in this college belong as of academic right" to transfer applicants who wish to major in esoteric subjects not taught elsewhere or to use expensive equipment unavailable at other colleges. He did not, however, mention a third reason now considered thoroughly respectable by the Committee on Admissions--marriage to a Harvard undergraduate after one or two years at college.
During Jordan's reign, the College at times took an almost irritating attitude of noblesse oblige. Radcliffe officials privately and publicly bemoaned the fate of qualified but rejected applicants doomed to educational mediocrity beyond the charmed circle of the Eastern syndrom. But by the late fifties, this attitude was gone for good. Pointing to a "serious crisis" in admissions policy, Jordan flatly declared, "Far too many students are applying to relatively few colleges." Only a week ago, President Bunting echoed his sentiments: "I am not convinced that Radcliffe is the only college in the world." The quantity of applications has forced Radcliffe into the unusual situation of beating the gong for other excellent liberal arts schools across the country.
And this raises a further problem, for Radcliffe, obviously, has a vested interest in siphoning off the best of the best. It isn't as easy as it sounds. For one thing, as Mrs. Farrington points out, the very brilliance of Radcliffe's image tends to scare away some of the people the College would like to attract. Though Committee members say they no longer worry about geographical, social, and economic distribution, Radcliffe remains an essentially Eastern, upper-class College. The majority of the applicants come from the New England and middle Atlantic states; the College still fills nearly 25 per cent of each class with Massachusetts residents. A survey of the educational backgrounds and occupations of the fathers of the 294 freshmen admitted to the Class of 1960 revealed that 247 possessed bachelor's degrees, 137 of them advanced degrees. One hundred