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They Went to College Early







now possible to appraise their four-year college experience, both in terms of their academic performance and in terms of their social and emotional adjustment to college life. This report, therefore, will focus principally on the experience of the first two Scholar groups, but it will also touch upon the experience to date of the two Scholar groups still in college.

Footnotes

Footnote :

1 There were three exceptions to the general practice:

Yale admitted only three Scholars in 1953 and in 1954 because it found that the number of qualified applicants for regular admission far exceeded the number that could be accommodated and hence felt it would not be wise to reserve a sizeable number of places for Early Admission Scholars.

The grant to Lafayette provided scholarship aid for the Scholars admitted in 1951, 1952, and 1953. Lafayette admitted a fourth group in 1954, but since these students did not receive financial aid from the Fund they were not counted as Fund Scholars.

Wisconsin, having been unable to fill its 1953 Scholar group, was authorized to give scholarship aid out of the Fund grant to 23 Early Admission students admitted in 1955.

HOW THE PROGRAM HAS BEEN EVALUATED

Through the co-operation of the participating colleges and the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey, a plan for evaluating the Early Admission Program was worked out in the fall of 1952. Under this plan, the colleges have kept detailed records on the Scholars and have compared their performance with that of a carefully selected group of Comparison students matched with the Scholars on the basis of academic aptitude. In addition, the Scholars themselves have completed questionnaires calling for 34 items of information about their family and school backgrounds, their experience in college, and their plans for the future. The considerable body of data emanating from these two sources has been compiled and analyzed by the Educational Testing Service.

Finally, in preparation for this report, each of the participating colleges reported to the Fund on its own experience under the program, and two independent evaluations were made by well-qualified professional people who had no connection with the Fund or with the experiment. The first was an appraisal of the social and emotional adjustment of the 1951 Scholars, made by a team of trained psychiatrists headed by Dr. Dana Farnsworth, Director of University Health Services at Harvard University, and including as its other members Dr. Daniel H. Funkenstein of the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Bryant Wedge of the Department of Student Health at Yale University. The second was an analysis by Richard Pearson, Associate Director of the College Entrance Examination Board, of essays written just before graduation by 1951 and 1952 Scholars