Opportunity for the HPC

The Harvard Policy Committee has collected detailed information from faculty and students that could be helpful to freshmen choosing areas of concentration. By analyzing the quality of tutorials and course offerings through the extensive use of interviews and questionaires, the HPC hoped to suggest improvements to the departments. But they have the opportunity to do much more. Having looked into the problems of curriculum, it's now important for them to look at specific problems of students.

Freshmen now beginning to grope for a field of concentration badly need more information. For this reason, the HPC should reveal all facts relevant to freshmen now, instead of waiting as planned until the end of the year to publish their full report.

The choice of a major can be just as important as selecting the right college. For many Harvard students, college has become only a preparation for more specific professional training. Yet what a student decides to study in college often leads to his choice of graduate school, which in turn affects his career alternatives.

Unfortunately, most underclassmen cannot find any comparative of critical basis for evaluating the various majors. The concentration dinners in April give each department's super-salesmen a chance to win over freshmen. And speeches in Common Rooms by honors seniors tell how it is if you're at the top of the heap.

Yet too many students each year leave their first chosen field, disenchanted. Some switching of majors is of course unavoidable. But the waste of time and effort, resulting from not understanding what one is getting into, is both unnecessary and undesirable.

Freshmen are entitled to a comprehensive comparison of the 34 possible fields of concentration. Before they can make a wise and informed choice of fields, they need to know something not only about the general requirements and amount of work, but also about the method of instruction, the course offered, and the faculty members teaching them.

The new HPC members have the opportunity at their initial meeting tonight to provide this information. Voting to disclose their data to freshmen would be an excellent way to begin the new term.