LOAN FUNDS

The depression has revealed with added force the need for some new source of financial aid available to students in meeting their college expenses. The scholarship funds are chronically insufficient, as shown by the number of applications received last year, approximately three times the available awards. At the same time the opportunities for term-time employment have shrunk rapidly until it has been necessary to create new jobs within the University. To this problem student loan funds administered by the University offer a solution which has not been adequately explored.

The value of loan funds lies in the fact that since all disbursements from them are returned, usually with interest, after a few years, the same amount of money put into them goes a great deal further than it would if administered as a scholarship fund. Although inferior to scholarships as a source of aid, since they impose an obligation on a man after graduation, they are generally to be preferred to term-time work, which prevents the student from getting the maximum profit out of his college course. Unlike scholarships, which are rigidly restricted to men of dean's list standing, loan funds are available for all students, thereby breaking the vicious circle encountered by many men who find that the lack of a scholarship compels them to do outside work, while that same work, by affecting their grades, injures their chances of getting a scholarship.

Loan funds constitute at present a comparatively minor source of financial aid but the University is rightly trying to increase them. The type of student who applies for aid through a loan is usually in college with a serious purpose and may be considered a good risk, as demonstrated by the insignificant number of loans which turn out to be bad. Those graduates, classes, and Harvard clubs who contemplate establishing scholarships would do well to turn their money instead into loan funds.