Telling All to a Computer

The first computers had barely been put to work by college administrators a few years ago when students began complaining that they were being treated like so many IBM punch cards. Now prospective undergraduates are eagerly paying $15 to get just that sort of attention. By having information about themselves put on punch cards, they are getting valuable help in choosing the right college. In a fast-growing computerized program called SELECT, a computer digests the answers to a four-part 283-item questionnaire in a matter of seconds and compares the answers with its store of information about colleges. It then prints out letters to the students and their high school guidance counselors, listing ten to 15 colleges that most nearly meet the applicants' academic, financial and other requirements. Last fall alone, 10,000 students turned to SELECT for advice.

Guidance for the Guides. Such computer-aided college selection offers help with three increasingly pressing problems. The computer's prodigious memory relieves students of the fear that they may fail to apply to the right school simply because they have never heard of it. The computer also helps remove a burden from hard-pressed high school counselors. Finally, the program assures consideration for less well-known colleges that have empty places and need students but are all too often overlooked by applicants.

SELECT was developed by two undergraduates at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bernard Klein and Ray Kurzweil. Klein had gained business experience in summer jobs at Sonar Radio Corp. Kurzweil had been working with computers since his junior high school days (at 14, he built and programmed a computer that wrote music). Both men agreed fervently that the process of college selection is a harsh trial of patience and endurance for most students. Together they raised $1,300 to lease computer time and to pay 20 Harvard students for assembling and collating information on the nation's 3,000 institutions of higher learning. Klein and Kurzweil based their final evaluations of different campuses only on official publications. They rejected student ratings as too subjective and too variable from one institution to another.

Seeing into the Future. The publishing firm of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., which bought SELECT last fall for an undisclosed sum plus royalties, now has a full-time five-man staff at work in New York keeping the 2,000,000 items of data on the colleges up to date. SELECT is already producing a potentially valuable byproduct for the colleges. The abundance of information that is available from student answers to those 283 searching questions should help college administrators estimate future needs for faculty and facilities. It will also help in the design of courses that will be responsive to what a new crop of students is likely to demand.

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