Serious Scholarship Crisis Depicted in Conant Report

Student scholarships and loans are facing their most severe decline in a great many years, President Conant declared yesterday in his annual report to the Board of Overseers.

"At the very time," Conant said, "when the independent colleges and universities need more money for scholarships to provide in some degree opportunities similar to those open to veterans from low income families, the value of our scholarship funds has drastically diminished."

"We are in the process of passing from the most favorable situation in out history in regard to student aid to the most unfavorable we have faced in many decades."

By 1952, Conant explained, the importance of G.I. benefits in financing University students will be practically nil. "This is a consequence," he said, "of the change in price levels without any appreciable offsetting factors in the way of increased endowment or high returns on investments."

Present University plans call for an great an addition as possible to scholarship funds in the near future, in an attempt to "re-establish the level of the program that existed before the war as a minimum objective," in coordination with a quest for increased loan funds and student employment.

Five Major Problems

The scholarship question was one of five crucial problems of modern college education, the Harvard aspects of which were outlined by Conant in his report.

A major part of the report was dedicated to a discussion of General Education, which, the President felt, "will affect the educational future of Harvard College for the balance of the century." The General Education program was made a required part of the College curriculum last fall.

After a three year experiment, the Committee on General Education expressed the opinion last February that the program should be required for future incoming classes. The proposal was adopted by a large majority. It constituted the first major change in the College's educational system since President Lowell's origination of the concentration and distribution methods now practiced.

Purpose of General Education

"Rather than collecting in one's mind a wide scattering of factual information," Conant said, "however helpful such information may be in a quiz program." General Education should give a student, through intensive study of certain phases of a subject, "that same sort of appreciation and understanding that comes to those who studied some branch of knowledge with profit for many years." This, he said, rather than providing a survey of a wide field of knowledge, is the true aim of General Education.

"Beyond the boundaries of one's living working knowledge," Conant insisted, "factual information is trivial and ephemeral, (although) it may be useful as a guide to communication with contemporaries on s superficial basis."

Grad School Crisis

In a third section of his report, Conant warned of the imminent and serious financial problems of the graduate schools, particularly the Medical School. Great advancements and uncertain endowments are the principal factors in the problem.

In the medical education crisis, he said. "the nation is faced with an educational problem of the gravest sort, far too serious to be solved by the efforts of a few universities by themselves." Harvard, he continued, is no exception to this problem. "The factors which have led to the present serious crisis ... are obvious. The drastic reforms in medical education during the second decade of his century carried with them by implication a rapidly rising cost of medical education for a long period of years. As the basic medical sciences expanded and became more and more closely associated with the clinical departments, the expenditures increased."

Conant named the increase of staffs and the dollar prosperity of the 1920's, followed by the rapid decline in the value of the dollar after World War II, as additional causes of the questionable financial future of the professional schools. He also mentioned the School of Public Health as being "in a precarious position," and added that "the importance of investigation and education in this field requires no comment." Fundraising for the school he said, has so far only been temporarily successful on year-to-year basis.

Particular attention, Conant added, must be paid to the problems of the seven privately endowed hospitals which cooperate with the Medical School. The Law School's problem is not quite so serious because of generous donations by alumni, although the school is now experimenting with teaching fellowships.

The other two problems discussed by Conant were the need for more two-year colleges and the coordination of pure and applied science departments.

He stated his belief that their is "an ever-increasing demand for advanced education on the part of citizens of a democracy in a technological civilization (and) many educators feel that a rapid expansion of two-year local terminal colleges in the answer..." He argued, however that the expensive development of a staff and plant for such a college at Harvard would not be worth the effort for the contribution it could make to American education. Harvard's task, he said, is simply "to train teachers and administrators for these institutions."

As for the problem of coordinating the pure and practical science departments, Conant said that this was already being accomplished at Harvard, and that, because of World War II, "the process of breaking down the old hostility between pure and applied science has been enormously accelerated.