Each year from 1951 to 1955 the University of Wisconsin admitted roughly 50 sixteen-year-olds who had completed at least two years of high school. Scholarships for these students were funded by the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education. The initial goal was to provide students two years of college before they were drafted into military service. When it became apparent that the United States would not have universal military training, the Ford Foundation’s program became an experiment in early admissions.
The experiment was launched by four universities: University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Wisconsin, and Yale University. They were joined by eight more schools.
In 2021 twenty-five of Wisconsin’s Ford scholars held a reunion online using Zoom to communicate. This website provides a place for the now octogenarian Ford students to record their histories, to comment on their experiences both as Ford scholars at UW and in their lives that followed, and to remember some of the Ford students who have died.
Useful background information about the program is also posted here. There are two evaluative reports issued by the Foundation: “Closing the Gap between High School and College” in 1953 and “They Went to College Early” in 1957. There are two articles written by UW publicists and published in the Wisconsin Alumni magazine, one in 1953 and one in 2005. There is also a 1998 University of Chicago Master’s Thesis essay by Evelyn Ruskin titled “From This Vantage Point: A Follow-Up to the 1951-1955 Ford Foundation Early Admission to College Experiment.” She developed a questionnaire that asked Ford students to assess their experiences as college students two-years younger than usual. Her study compares the responses of some Wisconsin Ford students with those of some Ford students who attended the University of Chicago.