The application for admission to Harvard College is a 22-page packet of forms; applicants have to write a lengthy essay and send in a battery of transcripts, test scores and recommendations. The admissions office takes about one out of every ten applicants.

All you have to do to get in to the Harvard Summer School is send in a one-page sheet of factual information or show up on registration day. It helps to be a college student, but the summer school makes plenty of exceptions.

Open admissions is what makes the Summer School different from the College. It is as close as Harvard gets to non-elitism, and depending on who you ask, the Summer School is either a second-rate version of the College or the shape of things to come.

Thomas E. Crooks '49, director of the Summer School, says it "wouldn't be correct to say Harvard lowers its standards during the summer."

"I couldn't care less for the standards during the regular year," Crooks says. "Open admissions is one of the main reasons why I stay here. The exclusionary atmosphere here during the school year often becomes stifling. I see the summer school as being on the frontier, as being typical of what colleges will be like in the year 2000."

The final figures won't be in until after registration day, but this year's Summer School should have between five and six thousand students--3500 in the regular Summer School courses, the others in a variety of special programs. About one-fourth of the regular students will be Harvard undergraduates, and the rest will come from all over--some from other Ivy League schools, some from other colleges in the Boston area and some from small black and Chicano colleges in the South and Southwest There is always a sizeable contingent of foreign students, mostly from Japan, as well as a chunk who live in and around Boston but go to college in other parts of the country.

The most popular courses are those that satisfy pre-med requirements, with Chemistry S-20, "Organic Chemistry," leading the pack with about 200 cut-throat competitors, many of them Harvard undergraduates who want to get it over within eight weeks. The male-female ratio is about one to one, as opposed to the College's 2.5 to 1--"another way we're ahead of the academic year," Crooks says.

All but about 55 of the students will pay a hefty $290 per half course intuition. Over $600,000 of the total tuition money will come from outside grants, which means that although low-income students don't have to pay for the Summer School out of their own pockets, Harvard still makes money on them. Unlike the College, the Summer School has little trouble breaking even.

Crooks vehemently denies, however, that the Summer School is primarily a money-making venture. "This money business is one of the oldest shibboleths about summer Schools," he says. "The whole University just sits here during the summer, and it would be idiocy not to put it to use. Harvard stopped that idiocy in 1871, and lately other Ivy schools have been trying to start similar programs of their own. It's harder to do now, because it's harder to make money." Universities trying to avoid wasting all their resources during the summer have tended lately to set up a summer term of the regular school year, like Yale did last year, instead of starting separate summer schools from scratch.

The Summer School cycle starts each year almost immediately after the session ends, when Crooks starts looking for a faculty, only half of which comes from Harvard. "Every fall we sit down with the department chairmen," he says, "and we talk about who we'd like. Most of the outside people who come were at Harvard at one time, got their Ph.D. here or something. A lot of departments remember old Jones who wanted to come back, and ask for him."

The professors are by and large not big guns. They tend to be non-tenured people at Harvard and not-too-famous people from elsewhere who want to see Harvard, do research at Widener, or impress a department enough to garner a job offer. They get one-fifth of their regular academic-year salary if they teach a full course-load.

The applications start to come in in the winter, some in response to the full-page ads Crooks takes out in the Globe and the Phoenix during Christmas vacation. "One of the things I like best about the summer school," Crooks says, "is that by and large people select us instead of us selecting them."

The annual operating budget of the Summer School is about $2 million, about the same amount that comes in in tuition and other fees. "There's no way for the Summer School to pay back Harvard," Crooks says. "We pay $44,000 for the library system, and that doesn't even cover the cost of Lamont. I could keep a set of books that would show a huge deficit for the Summer School, or I could keep a set of books showing a huge profit, but we try to pay all explicit costs, things like rent for our offices. I also try to keep summer students from being exploited with high room and board charges--it costs summer students more to eat than undergraduates during the school year, even though there's only one dining hall open for the regular summer school."

Besides its student body and financial setup, the Summer School has an entirely different power structure from the College. Its offices are scattered around the fringes of the Yard, in Holyoke Center, Memorial Hall and Lehman Hall. Crooks, a

Open admissions is what makes the Summer School different from the College. It is as close as Harvard gets to non-elitism, and, depending on who you ask, the Summer School is either a second-rate version of the College or the shape of things to come.