It's no secret that America's 1600 colleges and universities are today facing their worst financial plight in history. For months university presidents and other education experts have been making speeches and writing magazine articles decrying an alarming money gap created by a partial economic recessing that drags down almost every source of income but touches hardly any costs.

These high costs, raised to an all-time peak during the post war inflation, are perplexing an increasingly large segment of the nation's colleges and universities. In 1948-1949 one-fifth of the private institutions of higher education lost money; included in this list were such schools as Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Brown. Harvard achieved a $500,000 surplus, but only by eating into precious reserve funds in order to pay off the debts of many deficit departments.

Unhappily, the disease of operating in deficit is fast spreading; some experts fear that as many as half America's colleges and universities may be running i the red by the close of the current year. The major costs- wages, salaries, and equipment still cling to inflation levels, while gifts, invested endowment, and in some cases tuition income, go down.

What especially alarms alma mater in her life-or-death battle for operating funds is that day by day they seem harder to find. In the first place, philanthropy is playing a reduced role today in college income; reasons include high taxes, talk of red infiltration in universities, and the general desire of would-be donors to hold on to their cash in anticipation of economic downswing. Secondly, interest on investment has fallen over a long period and is likely to stay down as long as the government's low interest policy continues. The third major source of income-tuition-is higher per head, but that doesn't always help. With the drop in veteran enrollment, fewer and fewer students can be found who are able to pay the bill.

The obvious steps for an institution haunted by the threat of bankruptcy-reducing facilities and raising tuition-pose alarming consequences. The serious fund shortage has already left many institutions no choice but to lower their educational standards by deleting courses, discharging teachers, and postponing plans for expansion or modernization. Raising tuitions, already at their historical peaks, in a time when less money is available for scholarships, means that more men will be kept out of college. Last year the President's Commission on Higher Education reported that for every man in college there is already another man, of the same or higher intellectual ability, who does not enroll because of low family income.

Such is the crisis in education. Not only are the lives of many institutions and the quality of their product seriously threatened, but college education might even become again a rich man's luxury. Future editorials in this series will deal with immediate and long-run ideas for rescuing higher education from its current troubles.