What kind of nationally "balanced" student body does Harvard want? How has competition from other Ivy League schools affected that ideal makeup, and what steps has the University taken in response? How much is the problem linked with football? These are some of the questions raised by Harvard's new promotion program which this report aims to study.

"From the first foundation to the present, four main streams have watered the soil on which the Universities have flourished. These ultimate sources of strength are:... the cultivation of learning for its own sake;...the general educational stream of the liberal arts;...the educational stream that makes possible the professions; and the never falling river of student life... The cultivation of learning alone produces not a university but a research institute. The sole concern with the student life produces an academic country club or merely a football team maneouvering under a collegiate banner. The future of the university tradition in America depends on keeping a proper balance between the four essential ingredients..." PRESIDENT CONANT, TERCENTENARY ADDRESS, 1936.

In New Haven this spring, a record number of men applied for admission to Yale College. In Princeton, the Committee on Admissions found its selection task "the most difficult in history" and lead to turn down 700 whom it judged to be "fully qualified." Meanwhile in Hanover, officials at Dartmouth completed the processing of a total splash of 3,500 applicants for but 650 places in the class.

Harvard, too, has attracted a peak number of applicants; but since the war, it has suddenly become locked in a friendly but dead earnest rivalry with every other top eastern college to recruit the "most outstanding" students in the country. For over the years Harvard has sought a Balance in the College" that includes not only top brains but also leaders in a variety of things other than scholarship. But certain fears have lately been growing that the numbers of men seeking admission to the College do not represent the best possible of all applicants.

Hence, keenest of all has been the competition between the Ivy "Big Four" of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth, who all essentially want the same kind of "scholar" especially "scholar-leader" and "scholar-athlete," and who all have developed the same desire to achieve a student body that is geographically representative as well. Provost Buck framed the problem as early as 1946: "What is not obvious to outsiders--and even to many very close to the situation as as it existed in the pre-war years--is the paucity of applicants of the kind we most desire."

And yet if the truth were to be told today, Harvard would probably finish a poor fourth behind Princeton, Dartmouth, and Yale in the aggressiveness and enthusiasm of its schoolboy recruiting program. For one thing, Harvard alumni have long been more loyal with their dollars than with the amount of noise put into any kind of tubehumping and attracting of prospective students.

Far more important has been the earlier start made by Harvard's rivals. Princeton, Dartmouth, and Yale all stepped up Schools and Scholarship Committee activity immediately after the war; but Harvard was much slower to realize that it now usually takes more to attract a boy to a college than merely handing him an application form and the address of the Admissions Office.

1. Delayed Action

Both Provost Buck and Director of Admissions Richard M. Gummere '07 early spotted the changing nature of college admissions programs; Buck was especially vigorous in spelling out Harvard's particular problems in two Alumni Bulletin articles in 1946 and 1947. A number of important organizational improvements in and out of Cambridge have since followed. But only the two most disastrous football seasons in Harvard history succeeded in arousing significant alumni recognition of the Administration's long-expressed desires to improve nation-wide promotion of a higher grade of applicants of all types.

Since 1949, over 50 Harvard Clubs have formed Schools Committees; still others have activated groups that had previously existed only as paper organizations. some of the alumni have doubtless come, complaining loudly about football defeats, and have then gone out recruiting with but one aim in mind. However, interviews with officials and detailed surveys of alumni committees conducted by the writers strongly indicate that the majority of the newly interested alumni view the problem of "Balance in the College" as much bigger than a short-run deficiency of talented football players. Specific observations are noted in the sections following.

The irony about Harvard's current problem of having to keep pace with its Ivy rivals in hunting nationally for applicants is that Harvard in the thirties was probably the first college to initiate such a policy. Admissions programs were then far calmer and more relaxed than they are today. In fact, President Conant's 1934 National Scholarship program was probably the biggest step ever taken up to that time by an eastern school to become a truly "national college." Alumni Scholarship Committees began multiplying in the West, where the early National Scholarships were concentrated.

Although western enrollment indeed rose during the 'thirties, a glance at the statistics on the next page reveals that Harvard even before was able to attract many a man to Cambridge from great distances.

Those were the days, Provost Buck notes, when Harvard was "living easily on its past prestige." Nobody thought seriously of having to "recruit" top-quality students. Gummere recalls that admissions problems in those days were "open and shut": the committee could do its whole job of picking a class in just four days, and somehow there always seemed just the right supply of outstanding candidates.

During the 'thirties, however, several things began to complicate the picture. First, excellent state universities like Michigan, Illinois, and California, as well as private colleges like Stanford and Oberlin--grew in academic stature and thus gained appeal for men across the country. At first, Harvard, with her tremendously strong reputation could ignore the competition. Armed with National Scholarships, Harvard could continue to push for a national college without any worries of having to step up recruiting appreciably.

But Eastern competitors like Princeton, Dartmouth, and Amherst started following Harvard's lead in looking west. One of the aims of the National Scholarship program, Conant says, was to "present the advantages of Harvard in places where Harvard is not so obvious." Other eastern colleges naturally saw similar advantages in expanding their own clientele. Noting Harvard's success, they responded by sending their alumni on the road both to attract new students and to interview them for admission.