Merit or Need in GSAS

IT IS DIFFICULT not to be angered by the financial plight of Harvard's graduate students. It is even more difficult to know whom to blame.

The GSAS administration, which compiled and instituted the Kraus financial aid plan over graduate student disapproval, is the most obvious target. In operating independently of the Commission on Graduate Education--a student-Faculty body established by the Faculty to formulate a policy and criteria for supporting graduate education--the Administration has clearly acted in bad faith toward graduate students who participated in the Commission's work.

Those students rightly found the plan inconsistent and unsatisfactory: it determined student need according to elaborate criteria but gave department chairmen the option to fund students as much as $1000 below that calculation. Then it earmarked another pool of funds for departments to use as bait for promising students who do not qualify for need-based stipends.

Department chairmen made it very clear that they would not endorse a plan which infringed too much on their long-standing autonomy to distribute aid according to academic promise--without considering student need. They claim that the quality of education at Harvard rests on their freedom to compete for students on the basis of merit.

The decision to bypass the Commission thus clearly locates the GSAS's center of power in the departments--not in the dean's office or the graduate student body. Dean Wilcox says that he has urged department chairmen not to fund students below their calculated need, but it seems unlikely that all chairmen will heed his advice. Many of them have already complained that the Kraus plan drains their "merit pool" to its functional limits.

Within the constraints of the 1973-74 GSAS budget, however, the departments cannot maintain their merit pools without cutting into need-based scholarship funds. The Kraus plan gives them the autonomy to do this--to the extent of $1000 per student. The plan has thus set an implicity priority for the GSAS--when funds are scarce, the departments will not be on the losing end.

But the major squeeze on GSAS funds results from vast cutbacks in Federal assistance, a development which has affected all other graduate schools equally.

As they confer with other graduate schools on their mutual problem of funding graduate education, we urge the GSAS to take the initiative in re-evaluating the necessity of merit funding in a graduate program. The University converted its undergraduate financial aid plan to a need-based system years ago, thus eliminating price wars for promising students.

A mutually endorsed plan to end competition for meritorious students, will eliminate the need for merit pools. The Kraus plan merely reinforces this need. Without the burden of merit competition, the GSAS can fulfill its commitment to those students who qualify for need-based stipends, without the fear of lowering the quality of its graduate students.