GSAS: Work Ahead

THE NEW financial aid plan the Faculty is voting on today answers many of the objections graduate students and faculty had in the past. It also leaves both faculty and administration with a full program of work to do if it is to result in a reasonable scheme for funding graduate students.

The administrative problems the plan inherited from the controversial Kraus plan seem to have been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Significantly, the calculation of a spouse's income has been revised to allow a subsistence income which is not taxed by the University. The calculation of parental contribution remains in the new plan. While the administration recognizes that the graduate students are more likely than not financially independent of their parents, it is working on the assumption that parental wealth is a good indicator of the student's potential wealth and thus the debt he can be expected to assume, as well as his current assets. Statistics gathered during the past year show that while this means of calculation is still not especially esthetically agreeable, it does provide a fairly clear picture of students' personal needs.

This leaves two aspects of the plan which satisfy no one. First, the new plan provides for an aid floor. This means that the University will admit students only if there is support money available for them, or if the students themselves are self-supporting. This ensures that no student will be stranded midway through his education because of lack of funds. This provision in the plan gives the graduate school the temptation to admit more and more self-supported students. Assuming a stable size of the graduate school, any decrease in available funds will mean a decrease in the number of needy students. Any rise in costs will again mean a corresponding drop in the number of needy students.

Only a concerted effort on the part of the administration to raise more money for graduate student support can keep this otherwise worthy aspect of the plan from becoming regressive.

The most inequitable aspect of the plan is the mechanism it provides for supporting meritorious students independently of their financial need. As the plan stands now, departments have the option of funding students up to $1000 below their calculated need, to provide money to offer students of high academic merit.

Merit money is probably necessary, at least as long as Harvard's competitors retain their own basically moneyoriented funding. Nevertheless, merit funding should not be generated at the expense of needy students.

Even if, as is the stated case, there is not enough extant University money to provide adequate merit funding money, the burden should not be put on the graduate students. Departments that feel the need to compete financially for the best students should be expected to seek out the funds to do so.

This plan should be recognized as a compromise measure. But as long as the administration does not offer assurances that they will seek more funds as actively as possible, the economic and ethnic diversity of the graduate school could be drastically changed by the admission of more self-supporting students. And unless the responsibility for generating merit money is moved from the graduate students to the faculty, this compromise will be forged at the expense of the lowest rungs of the hierarchy, the graduate students.