In the fall of 1951, eleven American colleges and universities opened their doors to 420 freshmen who differed from the average college freshman in two striking respects: they were roughly two years younger and only a few of them had finished high school.

These "Early Admission" students were the pioneers in an experiment financed by The Fund for the Advancement of Education to determine the wisdom and feasibility of allowing carefully selected students of high academic promise to break out of the educational "lock step" and complete their schooling at their own best pace.

THE PROBLEM TO WHICH IT IS ADDRESSED

The experiment was one of a combination of five projects supported by the Fund as part of a broad-scale attack on two closely related weaknesses in the American educational system which tend to impair quality and impose waste. The first is a lack of sufficient flexibility to accommodate the wide differences in ability, interests, and maturity that prevail among young people of similar age. The second is a lack of continuity in the various stages of the educational process, which too often leaves gaps in a student's education or forces him to repeat work he has already done well.

Although these weaknesses occur throughout our educational structure, they are most prominent and perhaps most serious in the four-year period comprising the eleventh through the fourteenth grades, including the troublesome transition from school to college. They affect the education of all students to some extent,