The Inflexible Deadline

More than 30 graduate students have been deprived of the opportunity to apply for financial aid during the next semester as a result of a bureaucratic muddle at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The students, who submitted their applications after the 5:00 o'clock deadline on January 10th, have been told by officials at the GSAS that their requests for aid will not be considered. Although most of the late applications were filed within 24 hours of the cut-off time--many within minutes of the deadline--the GSAS has flatly refused to accept late applications. As a result, several students may be forced to leave school this term.

In defending the Administration's policy, Dean Phelps has argued that if the University did not insist on the inflexible deadline and rigidly reject the late requests, applications would continue to dribble in long after the GSAS began alloting funds. The process of deciding between applicants is complicated and time-consuming: the students receive a preliminary rating from Phelps' office and their applications are then sent to the departments, where they are ranked in order of preference. At some point, Phelps has insisted, an absolute deadline must be imposed.

Still, there seems to be no good reason why the Administration could not replace the present procedure with a more flexible method, such as a system of graduated fines. By penalizing students for submitting their applications after a certain time--instead of rejecting them out of hand--the GSAS would surely induce all but a handful of applicants to comply with the deadline. Those who failed to do so would face steadily increasing fines and, ultimately, an absolute cut-off date.

This procedure would be more consistent with the function of Phelps' office as an intermediary between the student and his department, rather than as a final judge of applications. It would not involve extra administrative costs, for most of the late applications now arrive within a few days after the deadline, and revenue from the fines would help pay the added expense. It would also eliminate the costs in terms of time and ill-feeling which disputes resulting from the present system produce. Hopefully, some means of aiding students who have been deprived of aid this semester will be found--either by reversing the ruling in certain exceptional cases or through aid which the departments may furnish directly.