It is difficult to conceive of 310-year-old 200-million-dollar Harvard as being in severe financial difficulty. As a matter of fact, she isn't. The University merely faces the same monetary difficulties that institutions and individuals throughout the country face in a period of rising prices, to be followed, perhaps and maybe, by a depression.

Today, despite its vast wealth, Harvard must plan carefully in order to stay out of the red. It is not easy for a University to cut expenses. More than fifty-five percent of last year's $25 million expenditure went into wages and the fixed salaries of permanent "Corporation appointees," while another twenty-five percent was eaten up by equipment and supply needs. The remainder went out to scholarships and prizes, retiring pensions, and that old accountants stand-by, "miscellaneous." Few major cuts can be made, if Harvard is to continue to provide its traditional facilities. The faltering tutorial system stands as evidence of what happens when the University commences to hack at its expenses.

Over on the other side of the ledger lies the matter of where the money comes from. Last year, tuition paid close to half of the University's expenses, while income from the endowment fund provided another quarter. Only ten percent came from a category known as "gifts for immediate use," which are outright cash donations not involving capital and interest; the remainder of the income issued forth mysteriously from miscellaneous' twin, "other."

Within the next few years, the great chunk of money brought in by tuition will be cut sharply, as the University reconverts to normal enrollments and the College abandons its three-term year. Reconversion will precipitate something of a drop in expenses, but during inflationary times such a drop can hardly compensate for the loss of tuition. This leaves the University two alternatives: to increase tuition, or to increase the endowment.

The former will be a last resort. Nearly every other major eastern college has hiked its tuition already, but Harvard's huge endowment has enabled it to maintain. its twenty-year-old rates. The Business and Medical Schools, however, have jumped their tuition, and in an effort to stave off similar rises in the College and other Schools, President Conant appealed to the Alumni last June for an endowment increase in the neighborhood of $50 million. On the result of his appeal depend future tuition rates.

Should there be a major depression, even the endowment income will be reduced. In 1929, such a reduction led the University to solicit a tremendous amount of "gifts for immediate use." These gifts which hopped from about one million dollars in 1926 to seven million in 1929, tugged Harvard safely through the crash. They were not, however, sufficient to block an average twenty-five percent tuition rise throughout the University.