Fewer Freshmen?

This is a great year to apply to Harvard. The nation's best-known university is not being less choosy about admissions, but it has 11% fewer applicants to choose from. Harvard is not alone. Overall Ivy League applications are down about 6%, with the dips ranging from 3% at Princeton to 18% at Yale. In fact, this phenomenon is nationwide. At both Ohio State and the University of Wisconsin in Madison, for example, would-be freshmen have decreased by 24%--in a year when U.S. high school graduates are expected to increase by 4%.

Admissions officers doubt that the new draft lottery is freeing high-number boys from the pressure to go to college and get deferred: most students do not get their draft numbers until after they have entered college. The favored explanation is economic: thousands of recession-hurt families are hunting for cheaper colleges near their homes. Thus applications have risen by 10% at relatively inexpensive state universities like Maine and Massachusetts. Community colleges are getting a big play almost everywhere.

Aside from the recession, though, the U.S. faith in college may be undergoing a subtle change--a creeping disenchantment with going to college at all. Many high school students seem to agree with seniors like Judy Hsia, 17, who attends Evanston (Ill.) High School. She is deliberately running the risk of not applying to any "safety" colleges. "If I don't make my first choices," she says, "I can always do something else for a year. There's no point in going to any college just for the sake of going. One of my brother's friends majored in physics at Haverford. Now he's a carpenter. He could have done that without wasting all that money."

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