How Many Judes?
SIR,--I must hasten to apologise for having misunderstood Canon Raven's reference to a "one-in-twelve" acceptance as applying to the university as a whole instead of only to his own college ; I can only plead the extenuating circumstance that I was in the good company of Janus.
But since I wrote two other Cambridge Colleges are reported as having given corresponding figures for their own acceptances, one being 139 out of 2,500, the other 132 out of 2,130. If this report is correct, the propor- tion of acceptances per college would seem to range very roughly between one-in-twelve and one-in-eighteen. As there are nineteen men's colleges, and as all agree that most applicants apply to several colleges before gain- ing admission or accepting final rejection, these figures seem strong evidence for my contention that—allowing for the undoubted fact that many appli- cants are defective in qualifications anyhow—there is something of a stage army of a few thousand applicants each year, tramping round one college
after another until moss of those who are suitably qualified do gain accep- tance somewhere. The rest, and pt abably a small minority of qualified but very late applicants, then start applying to other t niversities ; and what happens to them there is no way of knowing, though I suspect that the best get accepted by the greatly expanded civic universities. In any case, all the college figures so far quoted provide no support for the wide- spread belief in a large number of frustrated but fully qualified applicant,.
—Yours faithfully, DAVID THOMSON. Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
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