Colleges Protest Way Grants Were Allotted

New England college presidents yesterday protested--some of them bitterly--the way in which the National Defense Student Loan Program recently allotted grants for long-term student loans. In Massachusetts, for example, the Program simply awarded to each institution about 10 per cent of the amount it requested, thus rewarding those that asked for the most, and penalizing those that made smaller applications.

President Horn of the University of Rhode Island said yesterday that it was "absurd for the government to look only at the requests, and disregard the actual needs." He pointed out that Humphreys College in Stockton, California, with a student body of only 400, received a grant of $32,750.

"I have been a strong advocate of Federal assistance" to higher education, Horn remarked, but "if this is the way Federal aid is to be administered, I do not want any more of it."

Method A Mystery

The $4952 grant alloted to Brown University is "of no consequence to us," said President Keeney, who added, "it is a mystery why the government chose this method of distrbution."

The Rhode Island College of Education did "an extremely careful job of estimating its actual need," explained President Gage, "and then we received only $165, a ridiculously small sum." In New England, grants ranged from Boston College's $54,472 to a $51 gift to North Adams State Teachers College, whose President wonders "whether it would ever be worthwhile to apply again."

According to Shannon McCune, Provost of the University of Massachusetts, that institution received only about 90 cents per student under the Program. "This is almost silly," he added, "but nobody shoots Santa Claus."

The director of the Program, Peter P. Muirhead, said his agency had "to operate on the basis that the best judge of need is the institution itself. We cannot substitute our judgement for theirs."

Harvard officials declined to comment on the administration of the grant program. As Wallace McDonald '44, Director of the Financial Aid Office put it, "That would be merely bickering."