False Alarm

When Selective Service announced last February that it would no longer defer most graduate students, academe responded with alarm. Harvard President Nathan Pusey complained that first-year classes this fall would contain only "the lame, the halt, the blind and the female." The Council of Graduate Schools predicted that most such classes would be slashed in half. Now most graduate school deans concede that their anguish was unwarranted, or at least premature. Fall enrollment will be surprisingly close to normal.

Nationwide, graduate school applications are actually running about 10% higher than a year ago. Some schools, anticipating a shortage, have accepted more than the usual number of applicants and may wind up overcrowded. Yale Law School, which can handle about 175 first-year students, now finds that 230 plan to enroll. Brandeis expects about 30 more liberal arts graduate students than it wants. The University of Miami figures that graduate enrollment will increase by 14%. Grad school acceptances by the University of Southern California are running 20% above those of last year. And at U.C.L.A., Director of Planning Adrian Harris says: "We haven't noticed any specific effects of the draft and will have about the same ratio of men to women, the same quality of applicants."

Lifting Gloom. What happened? The explanation lies mainly in an unexpectedly sharp reduction in monthly draft calls (the September quota was 12,200, compared with 44,000 last May) and the sluggishness of the Selective Service bureaucracy. Local draft boards did not begin reclassifying deferred students until June. A month's delay is allowed for appeals. And, while physical exams usually take another month to process, all physicals were suspended in July and August on grounds of a paper work and funding squeeze. Some boards are also waiting until present deferments run out, most in September and October, to begin reclassifying students. Also, grad students fail to pass physical exams more often than younger draftees, partly, implies one draft official, because they can afford doctors skilled at detecting deferrable ailments.

Although the gloom over the fall term is lifting, graduate deans are fearful of a slippage of students during the year as draft machinery catches up with them. Since boards can allow students to complete any semester they start, the real impact could be felt at first term's end. But unless manpower needs suddenly increase, grad schools may find themselves inconvenienced rather than crippled.

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