Most institutions also favored the candidate of greater financial need. Most favored the public high school student over the private preparatory school student. A few colleges, seeking to avoid selecting scholars who would be "conspicuous oddities" on their campuses, favored candidates who looked older than their age.

The selection of the pioneer group of 1951 Scholars was made under a dual handicap which was not present in subsequent years. To begin with, the original grants were made in the late spring and early summer of 1951, which allowed the participating institutions much less time for selecting the Scholars than they were accustomed to have for selecting entering freshmen. At Yale, for example, the personal interview is a significant aspect of admission policy, and more than 80 per cent of all candidates for admission are interviewed by alumni or members of the admissions office. But in the case of the 1951 Scholars, it was possible to interview only a handful of the applicants. One result of this was a relatively heavy loss of Scholars during the first year because of adjustment difficulties. Several other colleges noted in their reports to the Fund that they too had less time than they would have liked in selecting their first group of Scholars.

A second factor which made selection of the 1951 Scholars more difficult than the selection of subsequent groups was the inexperience of most of the colleges in recruiting such students and in gauging their social and emotional readiness for college. This is far more difficult to measure than academic readiness, and techniques of appraisal had to be learned.

In general, subsequent groups of Scholars were much more skillfully chosen than the 1951 group. The colleges and universities, benefiting from experience, refined their techniques considerably as the program continued.