Sometime before the end of January, President Johnson will decide the fate of this year's 550,000 male college graduates and first-year graduate students. The instrument of his decision will be the draft, and the problems it faces him with are complex. He will have to decide which graduate students to defer whether to induct the oldest or the youngest first, and how to select the 300,000 draftees from an eligible pool of more than one million. Neither official nor unofficial Washington knows what the President will decide, but there are already some clear indications of what to expect.

Under the 1967 Military Selective Service Act, the II-S undergraduate deferment is granted automatically each year either until the student graduates, drops out, fails to pursue a full-time course of study satisfactorily, or becomes 24.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) plans to propose a bill early in the 1968 Senate session that would abolish this protection. But unless American casualties in Vietnam reach a level that can be universally regarded as catastrophic, his bill has little chance of passage. Congress voted last summer to keep undergraduate deferments in the face of both the President's Draft Commission's recommendation to abolish them as well as the statement of U.S. Commissioner of Education, Harold Howe, that he considered them "unjustified." The current American dream is to send one's sons to college, and -- barring a major escalation of the Vietnam war -- there is no reason to believe that Congress will be any more willing to smash the voters' dream next year.

The issue of graduate school deferments is more complicated. The new law abolishes all graduate deferments at the end of this academic year, with the exception of students who are already candidates for their doctorate. They will continue to be deferred for a total of five years from the time they first started graduate work. The law also empowers the National Security Council -- headed by the President -- to select any number of fields of study for graduate deferments.

Under the present system of drafting the oldest men classified 1-A first, the present first-year graduate class in fields not selected for deferment by the Council would be almost completely decimated. This policy will definitely be changed.

The Marshall Commission, the Mark Panel (composed of military men), the President, and the Defense Department are all agreed that the youngest men should be drafted first. The President is empowered to change the order of call, within certain strictly-defined limits. A prominent Defense Department official said last week that he will make the change this summer whether or not Congress acts in the interval.

The reason for this change is that without graduate deferments under the "oldest-first" system, nearly two-thirds of the men drafted starting in June would be between 22 and 25. And in the words of Selective Service Director Lewis B. Hershey, "the older men are no damn good." The army considers them less malleable, less physically able, and less receptive to training and the military system in general than the more desirable 19-year-olds.

But the law does not allow the President to change the order of induction throughout the range of eligible age groups. It restricts him to "providing for the selection or induction of persons by age group." And within the age group chosen, he cannot "effect any change in the method of determining relative order of induction." He must take the oldest first within a certain age group. This means that the President cannot simply order Selective Service to start drafting 19-year-olds first and then the 20- and 21-year-olds later. He must designate one age group -- such as 19-year-olds -- and then must draft the oldest men within that group first.

The President will get around Congress' stipulations by designating all qualified older men who have just lost their deferments (such as college graduates losing II-S) as "constructive" 19-year-olds for draft purposes. Without any graduate deferments this will mean a June eligibility pool of 1,113,000 real and "constructive" 19-year-olds. Both groups will be treated equally. Barring a major mobilization, 1968 draft calls are expected to be no higher than 360,000, or one-third of those eligible.

The actual pool will be smaller because some graduate students will be deferred, although not so many as recent reports might indicate. The President said last spring that he favors deferring students studying to be dentists and doctors, including veterinarians, osteopaths, and optometrists. The National Security Council asked the Interagency Advisory Committee on Essential Activities and Critical Occupations to compile a list of fields that merit deferments "in the national interest." The Committee's completed recommendations, which have slowly leaked out to the public, are presently known to include "the earth, biological, natural, and physical sciences"; teaching the new, and presently unknown, list of critical occupations (such as glass-blowing); also engineering, health, linguistics, mathematics, pharmacology, and psychology.

The National Security Council will probably reject this list and return to the President's original recommendations. The reasons are many. The most important factor is that the Committee based its recommendations on the assumption that the "oldest-first" system would be retained, which it will not. In testimony before the Senate Sub-Committee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty last March, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz said that if 19-year-olds and some older men are drafted, there is no justification for educational and occupational deferments strictly from a consideration of civilian manpower supply.

His logic is easy to see. Without graduate deferments, it is true that "oldest-first" would have meant a virtual depletion of men very near the practice of their profession, whether it be engineer or political scientist. Under the new system, however, not nearly so many older men will be taken. They will be replaced by 19-year-olds, men hardly close to or even sure of their future profession.

Another reason for eliminating graduate deferments is the strong feeling among federal officials that II-S should not be used to avoid military service entirely. Deferring medical students would not do this, as doctors are subject to a special draft which eventually takes more than half of them. But deferring the students in the fields on the Committee's list would mean virtual draft exemptions for nearly half this country's graduate students. This would be an unacceptable situation to both draft and government officials.

If only medical students receive graduate deferments, the eligibility pool would shrink slightly--to 1,090,000--a figure still far too large for current draft needs. The most vexing problem facing the President is how to select 360,000 draftees from this pool without instituting a random selection system, specifically forbidden him by Congress. The irony of the situation is that before the new law, the President could have instituted a random selection system without Congressional approval. But now he must either get Congress to adopt a random selection plan before June or devise a stop-gap system for this year that is both equitable and looks so little like a lottery that it will pass inspection by the House Armed Services Committee, a steadfast opponent of random selection.

The two selection systems currently being considered utilize the "constructive" 19-year-old pool and both have nearly unacceptable inequities. But unless a new alternative is devised (and the prospects are dim), or Congress acts, one of the two will be in effect by June.

The first is known in the Pentagon as "age-mix." Under this system, everyone in the pool is considered to be born in the same year and the oldest ones are drafted first. This would mean that men born in the first third of the year (January through April) would fill the entire year's draft call. Other "19-year-olds" would probably remain untouched. And there are an infinite number of gimmicks and variations to this plan. Draft boards could be told to work by the fiscal year which begins on July 1. Men born in July through October would thereby be selected. Or the boards could fill the year's total call by using months as the time limit, drafting those born early in each month. It could draft those born after the 15th of every month. Or they could fill each month's draft quota with men born only in that month, probably a more inequitable system since monthly calls vary by as much as 10,000. This system can be varied infinitely. Constant changes, however, are considered too administratively cumbersome to be workable.

The other system under consideration borders so much on the random that it could very well be challenged in Congress. Known as "random-birth" or "birth-mix," draftees would be chosen by taking all the men born on one of a number of arbitrarily selected dates in each month. This would involve drafting at one time men born on the same dates in all 12 months, not just those born at certain times of the year or months. When shown this plan, General Hershey said it was clearly random, violated the oldest-first dictum, and would very clearly be declared illegal by Congress. Don Gifford '60, Kennedy's aide and draft expert, disagreed. The issue remains to be settled.

The only clear advantage of these systems and their variations is that they would entail only one-year of maximum vulnerability, compared to the six presently possible under "oldest-first." Once a registrant's year as a real or "constructive" 19-year-old is up (or his month when calls are filled only from those born in the month), he would be placed below all the new "19-year-olds" and run a negligible risk of being called if quotas remained stable.

But because yearly induction notices are not envisaged under either system, the registrant could be called after starting and perhaps nearly completing his school year. Since the I-S deferment has been abolished, a graduate student can be inducted in the middle of the year with no recourse other than the sympathy of his board. But once told the year's or month's starting point in the "age-mix" system or the chosen birth-dates in the "birth-mix" system, a registrant could estimate his chances of induction with a fair degree of accuracy. It's bookmaking.

The decisions facing the President are difficult ones. But it is hoped that he, unlike Congress, will make them on their merits and not their political efficacy.