The Army Disposes

U.S. college students and colleges finally learned their wartime fate last week. For the colleges it was worse than they had feared. As President Roosevelt signed the teen-age draft bill, making most of their students draftable, he said he would soon announce a plan to use "certain colleges and universities for the training of a limited number of men of the armed forces for highly specialized duties." The plan had already been outlined to Congress when the bill passed:

> Some 100,000 uniformed men, picked by competitive examination regardless of whether they have previously attended college or could afford tuition, will be sent to college at the Army's expense. They will undergo nine to 27 months of training in science, engineering, medicine, other specialties.

> Each chosen college will get about 500 Army students, which means that only about 200 of the nation's 1,700-colleges will be used. These will be mostly big endowed colleges and State universities. Out in the cold are most small liberal arts colleges.

> Still undetermined is what will be done with 250,000 Army & Navy reservists now in colleges, but it is a fair bet most of them will not stay there long.

Congress adopted a tough attitude toward the colleges: although it agreed to defer teen-agers still in high school until the end of the term, college men may be called immediately. But gloom is not evenly distributed on the nation's campuses. Technical schools, which are training more students than ever before, and colleges like Harvard, Yale, North Carolina, Iowa, Dartmouth, already crammed with thousands of Army & Navy men, are not particularly worried. Even some small liberal arts colleges, having heard the worst, found their case not entirely hopeless.

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