Fair Tuck

The Tuck School, oldest graduate school of business administration in the country, embarked on its fourth quartercentury last month with a new set of superlatives in its wake.

The entering class, the 76th, glows with superlatives. Picked from the largest - by a whopping 45.5 per cent - number of applicants, the group of 133 new MBA candidates is collectively the oldest; it has accumulated the greatest amount of work or military experience before matriculation; and it includes the largest number of women. And it bids fair to graduating the richest, if the trend of ever more munificent starting salaries - up to an average $17,000 for the Class of 1975, compared with $16,500 the year before - continues.

Tuck's Class of 1977 was selected from a record 1,215 men and women applicants, a significant jump from 835 the previous year and almost double the number applying in 1972. David J. Evans, director of admissions and student affairs, calls the trend "counter-cyclical," a direct consequence of economic recession and a weak job market.

"As jobs becomes scarcer and scarcer for those with college degrees but without clearly marketable skills," he explains, "more and more college seniors who might have otherwise gone directly into business following graduation are deciding they need professional management education." In addition, he suggests that many who sought alternate careers in the late '60s and early '70s have already felt the lack of professional training. Also contributing to the boom in applications is the increasing career-orientation of college students who have a more positive attitude toward business in general than their predecessors of a few years back.

In the entering class are 30 from the College, among them eight seniors combning their last undergraduate year with their first year at Tuck.

The average overall age at matriculation was 24.4 years, with the range from 21 to a 42-year-old retiring Navy officer preparing for a new civilian career. He is one of more than half of the class with some work experience intervening between college and the start of graduate work.

From the one lone woman enrolled in 1968, there are 20 in the Class of 1977, bringing the presence of women in the Tuck student body to a record 14 per cent.