Mr. SISK. Dr. Horsky, this may be somewhat out of order, but I would just like to have your comments on this. It is my understanding you are President of the Board of Higher Education of the District of Columbia established under P.L. 89-791. Now I am sure you have made some study of this situation and of course your Board in a sense is going to be controlling here. Are you satisfied that the language in the present legislation has ample provision to make this possible so there would be no legal barriers or no questions raised if subsequently court action were taken?

Mr. HORSKY. On that question, Mr. Chairman, I have no doubt whatever; there is no question about the fact that there is ample authority to enter into the cooperative programs at the Washington Technical Institute which Dr. Farner has mentioned.

I should, perhaps, add by way of further satisfying you and Mr. Nelsen as to the procedures of the boards of the two schools. The Board of Higher Education for the College, and the Board of Vocational Education for the Institute, have themselves met in cooperative meetings and are determined that this kind of cooperative arrangement under the land grant procedures will be worked out. The Boards are thoroughly in accord with Dr. Farner's intention to use to the limit the facilities of the Institute wherever they are appropriate for carrying out the purpose of this legislation and we will do so.

Mr. SISK. Thank you, Dr. Horsky. We have some other members who have come in. And if you want to remain, Dr. Horsky, it might be that there will be a few more questions. My colleague from New Mexico, Mr. Walker, do you have any questions?

I might say we have Dr. Farner, who is President of the Federal City College, Dr. Wiegman and Mr. Horsky.

Mr. WALKER. I have no questions at this time, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SISK. The gentleman from Ohio-before we dismiss these witnesses who, I think, we have pretty well completed, does the gentleman from Ohio have any questions?

Mr. HARSHA. I have a number of them. I want to review them first. They may have answered some of them. I will wait.

Mr. SISK. Well, we would hope to conclude this hearing this morning. This is the point I might say to my good friend.

Mr. HARSHA. What is the rush?

Mr. SISK. Well, I think there is rush, there is some desire to go ahead and move the legislation. And I am not trying to rush my good friend. I realize he got here a bit late. Their statements are before you and we would like to go ahead, if there are questions to be asked. I was expecting to dismiss these witnesses and we would not expect to have them back before us again. Of course, if there are other witnesses, we will continue this for whatever period of time we need. That is what I had in mind.

Mr. WALKER. Chairman, while we are waiting, before I arrived, was anyone asked the question, or has anything been said about what I saw in the paper, namely that the Federal City College would select students for admission by lottery. Has this been touched on?

Mr. SISK. Well, I might say to my friend from New Mexico we had not gone into any of the general questions regarding the Institution and the setup of the Institution. We had so far concentrated on this matter of the financing, that new financing would be made available

in making the Federal City College a land-grant college which, of course, would then qualify them for the so-called cash in lieu of landgrants since there are not lands available and would make available to the Federal City College a capital grant of initially $7,241,706, as I understand it, plus it would qualify them for annual grants in amounts of, say, $50,000 under the Morrill Acts and then I believe under the Bankhead-Jones Act $170,000. Is that approximately right, Dr. Farner?

Dr. FARNER. Yes.

Mr. SISK. I think Mr. Walker's point is of interest because we are all concerned with how you are proceeding, and we have all read headlines as to the great number of applications that you have, recognizing that probably you do not have the capacity for 5,000 students to start with, or whatever amount the most recent amount is. You might proceed to ask your question. I think it might be helpful.

Mr. WALKER. I was just curious as to whether you have formalized any specific method whereby you intend to select the students to be admitted from the applicants.

Mr. HORSKY. Let me interject just a moment, sir, and then I will turn it to Dr. Farner. The Board of Higher Education at its last meeting tentatively approved a limitation of the number of students to less than all that had applied for reasons which Dr. Farner will explain, and a tentative approval of a method of choosing the ones from the applicants. We are meeting again tomorrow for further consideration of these two questions and hopefully a final decision on it. We have a procedure by which no action of the Board is taken finally at a meeting. We take it tentatively and then allow opportunity for further hearing, further community reaction, further cogitation until the next meeting when we take the final action, sort of a first reading proposition. I think on the substance of it with that statement to you of where it stands I would ask Dr. Farner to explain what our problem was and what the tentative answers that we have arrived at are.

Mr. WALKER. I might add at this point that I am not advising any opposition for or against it.

Mr. HORSKY. You are curious.

Mr. WALKER. I am curious for that information.

Mr. HORSKY. I am glad you are.

Dr. FARNER. The original enrollment estimates prepared quite some time before I came, before we really got going, called 1300 students to attend the college the first year, and this was the basis on which we were planning. We also expected not all the students who sent in an application for admission to necesarily want to come to us only. So that as we moved our number of applications moved up from 1,000 to 2,000 to even 2,600 or so. When most colleges only realize about 50 percent of registration against the number of applications we seemed all right against the enrollment of 1,300. But then in the final three weeks before a deadline we had established of 15 February over 2500 additional applications reached us.

And secondly, we got evidence from interviews and questionnaires with some of the applicants that many more than is normal had applied only to us, or were virtually certain to come, so that with these two factors operating together we shot up to over 5,282 applications

by the deadline. And an indication that rather than 40 or 50 percent of the applicants actually registering in the fall we might expect 70 to 80 percent even.

This, then, faced us with the proposition of having as many as 4800 students, or 4500 students wishing to attend when we had been planning and doing our faculty recruiting and our renovation of temporary facilities and so on on the basis of 1300 which we always knew we could go a little above.

So at its last meeting, the Board in addition to the two actions which Mr. Horsky mentioned, that is, saying that 2400 students was as many as we could recruit faculty for since we are right in the heart or a little bit past the peak of the faculty recruiting zone now even, and since there is a six-month lag or so on the renovation of facilities we are renovating will peak out on capacity at something around 2400, that we have chosen that figure-I cannot defend that figure over 2300 or 2500 really, but-and in addition to that, that we would explore with the District government the procedures for amending our 1969 budget to allow us to handle 2400 students rather than 1300. It is not a direct proportional increase because some of the money for the lower enrollment was in the form of planning and crankup money to get us started. So although we are nearly doubling the number of students we are not in any sense nearly doubling the budget-now we are faced with the problem of how to select those students who will get the first offers of admission.

First of all, before I go into that side of it, I would like to allay some fears that the number 2400 sounds a great deal lower than the number, say, 5,280, but some 20 percent of the students who have applied would not accept an offer even if tendered.

Secondly, there are some students in the large group who desire educational programs that are the strengths of the Institution so as we do the pre-registration counseling and admission work with these students, some of them will, I think, elect to apply to the Institution rather than to us.

Thirdly, the parttime-fulltime question is a difficult one for us to determine. We have interviewed many of our students. They say they want to be fulltime but then they also say that they wish to work quite extensively, so it could be that not all of the students will be fulltime which will open up other opportunities for students on a fulltime equivalency basis to fill those positions.

Then, last, we will have a certain amount of attrition in the student body during the three quarters of the academic year, and we intend to fill back up to the original 2400 on those basis which are not used by those students who do not continue after the first quarter.

So that all-in-all, we think that we will be able, with 2400 spaces, to offer admission to just under 90 percent of the applicants, but they would not all be able to be offered admission. Some of them might be asked to start in January instead of this fall.

So that now the question is how to determine who gets first shot. We want very much for our student body, the first year, to be representative of the student body in subsequent years, because we are doing a considerable amount of curriculum experimentation. Our faculty recruiting and faculty evaluation is based on teaching rather than a research function with a student body that will have a very wide variety

of readiness for college. So, therefore, we do not wish to use methods of selecting the students that will cause the student body to be sharply, say, stronger students or weaker students or older students or younger students or male or female or veterans or nonveterans or any of the other factors that we might have used to do the selection.

So we really boiled it down to only two possibilities: One, chronological date of receipt of application which we do have on record, or a random process to assure the most representative sample of the total application group.

We had to reject the chronological factor for several reasons. Much of this application traffic resulted from a series of visits which I paid to the high schools of the District telling the students about the college and explaining the program. But I did not do those all on the same day, of course, so that they were strung out over a period from the 10th of November to the 10th of January, but all but one of them was done before the Christmas holiday. But it would be very unfair to the one school where I did not go until after the Christmas holiday because there were more than 2400 applications by the time I went to that school as an example. So that for that reason and for the fact also in some of the schools the counselors held the applications of the students for several weeks, assembled, cleaned them up and then sent them in, that sort of changed the date really that these students had applied.

So we proposed then a random selection process where all students who applied before the deadline have an equal opportunity to be number one in the list. They also have an equal opportunity to be number 5,280, which happens to be the number of feet in a mile and we often think how long that line would be.

Now, we will use the number as a sequence, sequence number to all the students in for pre-registration and counseling. If we find that some of the students, for example, thought they were seniors in high school but turn out to be really only juniors they are not eligible to start next fall because they have not achieved high school graduation. So as we counsel along, then we will determine the eligibility of the student and determine whether or not he might have a better opportunity for the program he wants in another institution, and then continue to call them in in the order of this sequencing by random

process.

Now, as Mr. Horsky said, the decision of the Board to approve this method is tentative and will be considered for its second reading as we say tomorrow at the Board meeting.

Mr. SISK. Well, thank you. I appreciate that explanation.

Mr. WALKER. I appreciate your statement Dr. Farner. I just want to make this observation, Mr. Chairman. I was a little concerned when I read about this method of selecting students, because I was hopeful that you would at least do some screening. Otherwise I think you will pass over many young people who are capable of doing college work. So I was just hopeful that you would at least do a certain amount of screening to avoid that.

I am not saying that I am against these young people who have not done so well in their high school days. I would like to see them, if possible, given an opportunity because we know by experience that many high school students who did not do so well in high school do well in college.

Dr. FARNER. Yes.

Mr. WALKER. I do not mean for this to be a guideline or anything, but by the same token, I still would hate for your to pass over those who have the aptitude to do well.

Thank you, very much.

Dr. FARNER. May I make a couple of comments on that point? We hate to turn anybody away. We hate to turn the ones who did not do well in high school away for the following reason, that if we turn them away, as the only public institution for the District of Columbia, they really have no place else to go. The stronger students can acquire scholarships and admission at other institutions. On the other hand, we certainly do not want to turn away all strong students deliberately and have a student less able than the total application group.

We are going to explore at our Board meeting tomorrow possibly measures of asking other institutions in this general metropolitan area to help by receiving some students solve this dilemma for us. We may be able to go out and actually ask some neighboring colleges to take some students from us on a tuition basis. We are exploring every possible way we can to make sure that nobody is turned away next year.

Now, one important statistic about our college, our application group that affects this is the fact that more than 60 percent of our applicants are not in high school now. This means some of them are out of high school several years. So to use their high school records, which might have been weak on the basis of a time, say, for years ago, when their motivation was much different, now they are attempting to either reduce their employment or drop their employment entirely and try to go to college, three or four years after high school, start college three or four years after high school, and this shows a great deal of motivation, and to use high school records on those students as a decider of whether they could or could not try would be difficult, I think.

Mr. SISK. Very good. The gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. HARSHA. I certainly appreciate your explanation because I shared the same misgivings about this lottery method that I think my colleague did. At least from the newspaper reports, it looked on the surface of it you would be preempting the fellow that had worked hard in high school so he could get in college

Dr. FARNER. That is right.

Mr. HARSHA. —and showed outstanding ability. Certainly you must give some recognition to achievement in high school as you screen these people. I would assume, from your explanation, that academic ability will be taken into consideration.

I think it is also fair to say, is it not, that if you had a student body of average people, they probably do not learn as much as if you have it mixed or have some people in there with special skills or outstanding skills.

Dr. FARNER. That is right.

Mr. HARSHA. Because they provide incentive for the average student, is that not so?

Dr. FARNER. That is true.

Mr. HARSHA. If you get a little encouragement and leadership from seeing the student next to you doing something well, maybe you try a little harder. It gives you a better academic program overall, does it

not?