Number of '61 Commuters Reaches New Record of 95

Ninety-five members of the Class of 1961 are attending college this year on what the Board of Admissions calls its "forced commuter" device. This plan stipulates that the student will not be accepted unless he agrees to live outside the college dormitories, either at home or in "approved" lodgings in Cambridge.

This idea was started last year on a much smaller scale, with only 20 forced commuters in the Class of 1960, less than one-fourth of this year's number.

"We did not want to start this program," David D. Henry '41, Director of Admissions, said yesterday, "but it was a natural result of the residential overcrowding in the Yard." Henry explained that anyone who was given a forced commuter standing would have been put on the waiting list but for the fact that he lived in some nearby community.

The college can house 985 freshmen in the Yard, and in former years the remainder of the freshman class was made up of regular commuters. The proportion of this group, however, has fallen off sharply in the last 30 years from about 25% in the 1920's to 3% last year.

"The result is," Henry said, "that the only way we can fill out a class of 1100 is by using this forced commuter plan. While we are most certainly not satisfied with it," he added, 'it is interesting to note that out of the 120 candidates we admitted in this category, 95 accepted, an unusually high percentage considering the circumstances.