All college-bound students face a problem of adjustment to life on the campus. Entering college usually involves the first prolonged separation from parents, and the first taste of responsibility for meeting life's problems without benefit of parental authority or guidance. Every freshman must learn to budget his time as between studies and social activities. Further, having parted company with boyhood associations of long standing, he is confronted with the need to establish another set of personal relationships. He must "find" himself in an entirely new community. For the majority of students, these problems of adjustment to college are readily solved, but they are nonetheless very real problems for virtually every student.

An appraisal of the social and emotional adjustment of the Early Admission students must start from this point of departure. The central question is not whether or not these younger students encountered adjustment problems, for all students do. Rather, it is whether the problems they encountered were significantly different or more severe than those they might have encountered had they entered college at the conventional age, and, if so, whether they were successful in meeting them.

The task of appraising social and emotional adjustment is a great deal more difficult than that of judging academic performance. No single type of evidence by itself provides an adequate basis for conclusions, nor are there available any satisfactory devices for achieving a neat statistical measurement. In the large majority of cases judgment must rest upon a careful