The Graduate-School Squeeze

In the world of scholarship, B.S. and B.A. diplomas have turned into routine pieces of paper; sheepskins with status carry the words "master" or "doctor." Three-fourths of all college seniors now say they intend to attend graduate schools. The 314,000 graduate students in the U.S. in 1960 have grown to 510,000 today.

Graduate applications have increased 75% in the past five years, partly because seniors apply to as many as ten schools -- paying an application fee of about $10 for each--to guarantee acceptance somewhere. About 70% fail to land their first choice. To handle all the applicants, some graduate schools have expanded their enrollments by as much as 20% a year in the past five years. The worst is still ahead: the postwar babies, now undergraduates, will begin to gang up on graduate gates in 1968. By 1970, there will be about 800,000 graduate students.

There are many reasons for this graduate growth; general affluence, the surge in undergraduate enrollment, rising vocational expectations, advanced-degree requirements in business and teaching, the knowledge explosion--and, not insignificantly, the threat of Selective Service.

Institutional Prestige. So far, the pressures have been greatest at the top graduate schools--Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, California at Berkeley, M.I.T. and Caltech. "Students too often seem to seek out institutional prestige instead of departmental prestige," comments Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard, who contends that there are "pockets of inadequately used graduate capacity" at many good schools. Out of 5,246 applicants last fall, Harvard took only 1,853. Yale's Law School got 2,000 applications for 165 openings. Michigan's graduate office mailed out 20,000 applications, got 12,000 back, accepted half, enrolled 2,000. Chicago enrolls only 1,500 of 6,000 applicants.

The Ouija Board. From the dozen documents that make up an application for admission, universities have little difficulty spotting the genius or the academic jerk. But after that, says Harvard Professor Stanley M. Cavell, member of a committee that decides who will enter graduate study in philosophy, "you get out the Ouija board, you offer prayer, you purify yourself. In this moment of despair you start looking at the watermarks on the paper--anything to differentiate one candidate from another."

If admissions officials sometimes despair, the college senior lives in a limbo of uncertainty for months. He gropes for advice on where to apply, flounders through a maze of uncoordinated information on fellowships, grants, assistantships, usually picks at least one prestige school, one with strong financial help, one fallback possibility. He badgers professors, who at a big campus may not even know his name, to write letters of reference. Some schools require essays on a senior's scholastic plans, or on himself. Says a Harvard senior about his autobiography: "The damn thing almost gave me an identity crisis. I sweated a week over those three paragraphs--and finally had my roommate write it for me."

Most seniors apply early in the year, then wait with dramatic desolati "My fate depends on a couple of people sitting in an office 2,000 miles away," says a Yale senior. Vanderbilt Senior Robert Thiel worked three days on his application to Yale, including a five-page essay and translation of a long English paragraph into German and French, got a one-sentence rejection. He spent five hours on his Stanford application, got a two-paragraph form rejection. It took him only 15 minutes to apply to the University of Virginia, where he was accepted.

"Help Me!" Admission officials concede that next to grades, the recommendation letters can be crucial. "It's an apprentice system," says Nina Hill-garth, head of Harvard's graduate admissions office. "In effect, professors are picking their own successors, and they do it very carefully." This puts the small-college senior, whose faculty is less famous, at a disadvantage. But Harvard accepted one applicant whose unknown professor topped his letter of recommendation in big block letters: TAKE THIS MAN! Harvard also took the applicant who pleaded in the margin: "Help me!" "We found this irresistible," recalls Cavell. "He dropped out after one term." But generally, "You can't con an admissions committee," says Cavell. "You can't be cooler, or smarter. What you've got to be is different."

Seniors seeking English and history graduate degrees have the toughest competition and the least financial aid. Science and engineering majors have it made; federal and other grants are plentiful. Medicine and law are tight, mainly because these professional schools--despite huge shortages of practitioners --are reluctant to enlarge.

Varied motives push students into graduate study. "I really don't feel prepared to do anything with this liberal arts education," says one Yale senior who has applied at law schools. "You've just got to go to graduate school." Another contends that "the pressure is parental--and it almost killed me." He finally said "To hell with it" and joined the Peace Corps.

Most graduate-school officials seem convinced that their students are serious scholars. "I've yet to meet a student who goes into graduate school to get out of the armed forces--and if I did, I wouldn't let him in," says University of Texas Graduate Dean W. Gordon Whaley. Yet one of Whaley's students says: "I'm sick of school. I don't want to work on my Ph.D.--but I don't want the Army a lot more." Echoes a Yale graduate-school candidate: "I just want to get off the damn scholastic merry-go-round for a while, but there's no place to get off to." Adds a Columbia graduate student: "I never wanted a Ph.D. --but how do you get a job as long as you're 1-A?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.