GSAS Passes Over The Needy

Feeling the first ill effects of its newly revised Kraus Plan for financial aid, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences this year rejected about 10 percent of the 1974-75 applicants ranked for admission because of their need for funding, The Crimson learned this week.

Under the provisions of this new financial aid system, the individual departments of the GSAS were permitted this year to accept lowerranked students who did not need financial aid and to "skip over" higher-ranked but more needy students.

In all, 854 students were offered places in the 1974-75 graduate school class and 84 other students, whom the departments had ranked higher than some of those accepted, were turned down.

Peter S. McKinney, administrative dean of the GSAS, said the financial aid plan was "not working badly considering the situation," and Brendan Maher, chairman of the Department of Psychology and Social Relations, said the "skipping phenemonon" was "an integral feature of how the financial aid plan works."

But graduate students had different feelings about the plan and about life at the grad school generally. Members of the Harvard Radical Union, a group of about 70 graduate students and teaching fellows, said they hoped that the entire graduate school would organize against the plan, which some of them termed "racist."

Robert O. Mathews, a third-year graduate student in Anthropology, said that most graduate students objected to the financial aid plan when it was approved by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in November because, he said, "it discriminates against blacks and working-class people."

This accusation has not yet been proven, but the statistics on this year's entering graduate students tend to lend credence to the notion.

Of the 521 entering graduate students, 128 (25 per cent) are women, 11 students (2 per cent) are black and six (1 per cent) are Spanish American.

The revelations of the past week may serve to confirm what some graduate students feared to be the case about GSAS admissions: that financial aid was, in fact, the final criterion for their acceptances.