The members of the class of 1996 will be the first Harvard students denied the luxury of having mail delivered directly to their entryways.

First-years will instead pick up their correspondence in a mail center in the basement of the Science Center that should be completed by August 24, according to Cambridge Postmaster Frank Carbonneau.

Under the new time-saving system, the U.S. Postal Service will deliver all first-year mail to the Science Center, and the mail will be sorted and put into mail boxes from there by University employees, Carbonneau said this week.

The former system required the Post Office to make deliveries to as many as 1800 separate Yard mail boxes.

"It already has impacted our work hours," Carbonneau said. "We've been able to consolidate a couple of routes and reduce the work."

The former system was almost unique among modern American universities, Carbonneau said.

"Harvard and Yale were the last two to be phased off the old system," he said.

The decision to change the system was prompted by a postal inspection two years ago, Carbonneau said. "A postal services inspector realized that we were not supposed to be doing what we were doing," he said.

The new setup may also have advantages for school administrators, according to Elisabeth S. Nathans, the dean of first-year students. Nathans said she hopes the Science Center boxes will be used to send intracollegiate mail free of charge.

"Since it's not U.S. Post Office property, it can be used for on-campus mail," Nathans said. "The savings are really quite spectacular."

The first-year dormitories are the "last hold-outs" in developing the new system, according to Ursula J. Moore, manager of the University's mail service. In the two years since the inspection, the Business School, the Law School, the Medical School and the upperclass houses have all converted to a centralized mail-room set-up.

The federal postal service granted a two-year "grace period" for the entire University to convert to the new system, Moore said.