of having entered college early? On balance, do you think it was profitable in your case?

What advice would you give to a friend of yours who was considering the advisability of entering college at an earlier age than usual?

Do you think the early admission idea should become a regular part of the admission policy of American colleges?

The Comparison students were asked this question:

In your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages of acceleration? On balance, do you think the idea is wise or unwise? Under what circumstances?

The responses of the Scholars and Comparisons are shown in the table on the following page.

As the table indicates, nearly nine out of ten of the Scholars who were about to graduate said that on balance it had been profitable for them to enter college early, and about eight out of ten Comparisons who were about to graduate expressed themselves as generally favorable toward the early admission idea.

Rather marked changes in attitude are observed when the answers to the four questions by the 1952 Scholars and Comparisons are compared to the responses of the 1951 group. The 1952 Scholars expressed far fewer reservations than their 1951 counterparts about early admission, whether they were asked about it as a personal experience, or in terms of advice to a friend, or in terms of a general policy for American colleges and universities. (One Scholar, in an emphatically affirmative answer to the latter question, wrote: "What I cannot understand is how early admission was once a regular part of American education and then abandoned. As you can imagine, I never miss the name of a great American who went to college early. Cotton Mather entered at twelve. Jonathan Edwards graduated at seventeen. This list could go on and on.")

The 1952 Comparison students also expressed far fewer reservations than their 1951 counterparts about the early admission idea. This increase in the "wholly favorable" category was not accompanied by any comparable shift in the proportion of students