Last year, Jordan completed work on a detailed investigation of the financial background of the girls in the college. His report, which could be typical of any privately endowed institution, is alarmingly pessimistic.

More than one-third of the student body comes from families whose yearly income is over $15,000; more than one-fifth from families receiving over $25,000 per year. Yet these groups comprise only 1.6 percent of all American families.

The number of students coming from families earning less than $6,000 yearly is slightly lower than those whose income is over $25,000, each group comprising about a fifth of the school. Even in this age of inflation, the first group represents more than 90 percent of the American population, while the second represents only one-half of one percent.

These figures shows that now, more than ever before, an education at a privately-endowed, liberal arts college is a luxury few can afford. Over half the students coming from families whose yearly income is less than $6,000 are able to do so only because they receive substantial scholarships or grants-in-aid.

As Jordan says, "The figures suggest that our scholarship resources, which until recently were regarded as reasonably generous, ought immediately to be very considerably increased. It is all too clear that a poor girl, if she lives at a distance, must be able to maintain a scholarship record if she is to come to Radcliffe at all."

Tuition Hike Increases Need

Last year, before the annual tuition was raised $200, the college's financial experts estimated that Radcliffe requires at least $20,000 more scholarship income. To get this, the scholarship endowment must be increased $400,000. But the new tuition hike is in many cases the back-breaking straw. Much more that $400,000 is now needed.

Beside trying to obtain this endowment, Jordan and his administration are faced with problems of physical expansion. The completion since the war of Moors and Holmes Halls has largely eliminated a once-severe shortage of undergraduate housing. In previous years, where a student could live was necessarily a criterion for admission. Now, the increased dormitory space allows any girl who wishes to live at school to do so.

But there is still a need for more co-operative houses. The present ones have been great successes. Their residents are able to save $250 in their yearly living expenses compared with girls in economy doubles, the next cheapest arrangement, in other college dormitories.

Jordan would like to see two more of these co-operatives, housing 40 student each. They would enable many more students from the lower income groups to attend Radcliffe. But he estimates that a co-operative house for 40 girls would cost $250,000.

Another acute problem is a graduate center, Radcliffe has the largest graduate school for women in the country. But nearly all of its 300 students live wherever they can find accommodations in Cambridge. Plans have already been drawn for a Graduate Quadrangle that will house at least 150 women and provide them with facilities for their intellectual and social development. However, estimates have placed the center's cost an two million dollars. A drive a raise this sum has just started.

The man who must face these rather staggering financial problems is an historian who, until ten years ago, had concerned himself almost entirely with the teaching side of education. But Jordan has been familiar with Radcliffe for over a quarter of a century. He came to Harvard in 1923 to get a masters degree after graduating from Oakland City College in Oakland City, Indiana. Picking up a Ph.D. in 1931, he promptly joined the faculty as an instructor in history and a tutor in history, government, and economics. It was in this period that he started teaching at Radcliffe.

Jordan left Harvard to become a professor of History at Scripps College in California, where he first met Nathan M. Pusey. Under Scripps' humanities curriculum, students studied first ancient then medieval civilization during the freshman, sophomore years. Pusey introduced Scripps' students to the glories of Greece and Rome, then shuttled them to Jordan, who picked up where his colleague left off and carried them through to modern times.

In 1940, he resigned his Scripps post to assume a similar one in English History at the University of Chicago. At Chicago, he took on the General Editorship of the university's Press.

Made President in 1943