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They Went to College Early
of years of school and college is not reduced, there is
certainly a need to keep able students working at full capacity.
Early admission can do this for a few, but the solution on a large
scale must be sought elsewhere.
In sum, early
admission has offered a partial solution to the problems of getting
the best from able students and of shortening the cruelly long
period necessary for technical training. The solution is only
partial because probably only a very few students have the balanced
development of intelligence, personality, and savoir faire
it demands. At Wisconsin it seems to have been generally quite
successful, and it could be more so if we had better techniques of
selection and enough Scholars so that each one would not feel
himself to be something quite apart from the ordinary university
student. It will probably always be expensive, and there will
always be some failures among the Scholars who embark on this
course, but the benefit to the successful is very great.
Yale
University
It seems to
be true that the Yale environment presented a more difficult
adjustment problem to the Scholars than did many of the other
colleges in which the early admissions Scholars matriculated. The
fact that almost all of the boys were from high schools and many
from relatively small schools no doubt made more difficult their
adjustment to a fairly sizeable campus in an urban center.
... the 1952
group seems to have made a more successful adjustment to the Yale
environment. This can be attributed both to the fact that the
adjustment factor was more in our minds when we admitted the second
group, and perhaps too, to the fact that they were in no way
isolated during their first year on our campus as were the 1951
Scholars.
Yale
University felt that it had received maximum benefit from the Early
Admission Program as sponsored by the Fund for the Advancement of
Education after its first two years of participation. From that
experience the University decided to adopt as part of its
Admissions program measures which would give qualified students
desiring to enter college from their Junior year in school a chance
to do so. To quote from the catalogue of Yale for 1955–56:
"Although