Twenty Negroes from Southern colleges will study here this summer under a new program organized jointly by Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

The purpose of the program, Dean Ford said last week, is to provide Negroes with the preparation they need to go on to graduate school, and to help them overcome problems of graduate school admission.

The students, most of whom are juniors, will enroll in the regular summer school session and live in college dorms. But they will receive special tutorials in addition to the normal summer school course work.

The program, stressing courses in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, will be financed by a grant from the Carnegic Foundation. The grant will also support another 80 students at Yale and 20 at Columbia. Although the exact amount has not been definitely settled, officials at the three universities expect it to be in the neighborhood of $180,000.

Harvard will raise money on its own for the education of another 10 Southern Negro students, bringing the total number here to 30.

Thomas E. Crooks, director of the Harvard summer school, said the intent of the program is "to broaden their hopes and possibilities and give them a wider basis for judging careers...Just the social effect of living with students from other parts of the country," he noted, "can be very beneficial."

The summer school has supported a similar program for several years with funds from "anonymous contributors"--foundations and local donors.

The students' tutors, usually graduate students or assistant professors, can "arrange for them to meet people who know what the score is," Crooks said. Tutorial sessions will be organized on a group and individual basis and will cover material normally missed in courses.

North-South Exchange

Officials at Yale stress that the performance of the Negro students on exams and course work can also help graduate schools judge whether graduates of their colleges need further preparation before beginning graduate work.

Joel Fleishman, who leads the Yale program, hopes it may be the first step in a broader program organized by Northern universities to improve Southern Negro colleges. A "consortium" of Northern schools, he has suggested, should work through state universities to provide staff and financial aid to Negro institutions.

Ford said last week that Harvard would "be interested in talking about this kind of program," but is not yet sure exactly what it would entail. The success of the present summer program. Ford warned, should not be judged on the basis of "a statistical jump in the number of students going to graduate school." The benefits of the program, he said "may be some time in coming."