Columbia, Wisconsin, and Yale—who at that time were concerned about the problems raised for education by the military manpower demands arising out of the conflict in Korea. It then appeared that for an indefinite period ahead the general education of many young men would be interrupted by the requirement of military service at or soon after the age of 18. In the spring of 1951, the four universities requested support for an experiment designed to allow able young men to complete two years of general education in college before being called up for military service. This was to be accomplished by admitting them to college before they had completed high school.

The grant was made, and its announcement immediately evoked widespread interest among other colleges, not simply in trying this approach to the educational problems created by the military draft but in experimenting with the broader idea of accelerating the education of young people who, although they had not yet completed high school, seemed ready, both academically and in terms of personal maturity, to enter college. Accordingly, the program was expanded to include seven other colleges and universities—Fisk, Goucher, Lafayette, Louisville. Oberlin, Shimer, and Utah. A twelfth participant, Morehouse, joined the program in 1952. This expansion, and the subsequent liberalization of the military draft regulations to permit college students with good academic grades to complete college before being drafted, soon broadened the cluster of projects into a large-scale experiment in early admission to college.

As originally conceived, the program was to provide scholarship aid for two groups of Early Admission Scholars during their freshman and sophomore years. In 1951, the participating institutions received grants totaling $2,118,400 for this purpose. Early in 1953, however, additional grants totaling $1,310,645 were made to the participating institutions to enable them to renew the scholarships of the first two groups of Scholars on the basis of need and academic performance and to admit two new but smaller groups of Scholars with partial scholarship assistance.