Harvard Admissions to Start Early Acceptance Next Year

Applicants to the Class of 1981 may be informed of their admission to Harvard as early as November of their senior year in high school, L. Fred Jewett, dean of admissions said yesterday.

Directors of admissions at several colleges in the Ivy League school group Brown and MIT--have tentatively chosen to adopt the early action program. application requirements by November 15.

Five of the nine schools represented at the meeting--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown and MIT--have tentatively chosen to adopt the early action program. The remaining four have decided to continue their early decision programs.

Students admitted to a college under the early action program will not be required to enroll at that school. Students accepted under early decision programs must attend the college that admits them.

"There is no reason why we should not be able to tell a student who has completed his application in November whether or not be would be admitted in April," Jewett said.

An early evaluation program, in which students who completed their application before November 15 were notified of their chances for admission, was too vague to be of any use to the student, Jewett said. The early evaluation program will be eliminated next year.

Under the early action program, the College may defer decisions on an application until April. Applicants who are rejected will not be permitted to reapply.

Mary Anne Schwalbe '55, director of admissions, said that the number of students applying before November 15 will probably not go up very much next year since "it will take so long for word to get out on the program."

But by the time the Class of 1982 applies, Schwalbe said, the number of early applications should jump significantly.

None of the directors of admissions at colleges adopting the early action program said they anticipate a flood of applications from high school seniors in November.

Worth David, director of admissions at Yale, pointed to two reasons which he said would discourage student from applying early in the fall. "First," he said, "Most student [early in the fall] don't know where they're going to want to apply. Furthermore, many depend on the strength of their senior year records."

David said Yale's decision to adopt an early action program grew in part out of an experimental rolling decision program Yale has run for Connecticut residents in the past. "We found that we were able to reach valid decisions in November," he said.

Marion Finbury, co-director of college counseling at Phillips Andover Academy, which sends about 50 students to Harvard each year, said the decision to establish an Early Action Program here was a "very humane and marvelous thing."