IT IS PROBABLY safe to say that no college has ever been as severely needed nor as eagerly anticipated as Federal City College, which opened in its temporary site, some two blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, in early September.

To say that the nation's capital has long needed a public institution of higher education is to understate the obvious. Before FCC, the only place that many D.C. high school graduates could attend was D.C. Teachers College, which has been dismally unfit for the task, recently running into accreditation problems. Eventually it will be taken over by FCC.

The local private universities and the public institutions in neighboring states have entrance requirements that are too stiff or costs that are too high for most D.C. students--over 90 percent of whom are black and most of whom are poor. And, added to the number who don't go on to college is the large group of people (about 25 percent of each class) that drop out before high school graduation.

FCC administrators realize that they cannot solve these problems overnight. The admissions office received close to 7000 applications for the first year, before it stopped accepting them, and only about 2250 full and part-time students will be able to attend this year. Those accepted were taken on a lottery basis, in keeping with the college's policy of open admissions, and several hundred others who were not accepted were placed in other colleges around the country.

Next year, FCC President Frank Farner, a 39-year-old graduate dean at the University of Oregon, hopes to get funds to take care of almost 5500 students, but it will still be a few years before FCC will be able to accommodate every D.C. high school graduate who wants to attend--which is the college's goal. And it will be a few years after that before FCC will actively be able to go out and recruit students and attempt to teach the large numbers of dropouts, as Farner wants to do.

One difficulty is that FCC was established and is funded by Congress, and nobody knows how willing that body will be to provide large amounts of money to the college. This year, FCC's operating budget is $4.3 million, but next year the budget request will be significantly higher, as FCC seeks money for construction on its permanent site.

The target now is to have one campus completed by June 1972, when this year's class graduates, and construction is expected to cost some $40 million over 3 or 4 years. The college hopes, if funds allow, to be able to build another branch as part of a "new town" in Fort Lincoln Park in the Northeast ghetto. The main site is to be in Mount Vernon Square, which is in the middle of a predominately black district in downtown Washington.

But, even in its temporary location--a drab, block-long building that formerly housed the Securities and Exchange Commission--and with just a fraction of the students that it hopes to eventually have, Federal City College is trying to do some innovative things in education. It is trying to make education relevant to poor blacks who have grown up in a city, to help them use what they have learned, and to learn from their experience.

It is also trying to involve students from the start in all of the decision-making at the college; and throughout the summer, students played a part in planning curriculum, administrative processes, and everything else that affects them.

Over 90 percent of the students at FCC this year are freshmen, and, for the first term, at least, the faculty is offering them 11 so-called core courses. There are also a small number of business classes, and various advanced courses of a more specialized nature for the transfer students. The core courses are inter-disciplinary, within the three areas of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

As such, they are similar in format to Harvard's gen. ed. selections. But, in subject matter and in the methods of teaching, they are quite different. Right now, students are not required to take one core in each of the three areas, but they are "strongly urged" to do so, according to one faculty member.

ALL FIVE social science core courses deal with one or more aspects of the urban environment. Two will be primarily "lab" courses--the "lab" being the surrounding Washington community--in which the students study urban social and political institutions. Individual projects, such as attempts at community organizing, are encouraged.

A team of teachers, consisting of a sociologist, an economist, a political scientist, and maybe a psychologist or historian (although history is officially in the humanities at FCC), conduct the courses. The things they planned to stress, one faculty member said in an interview this summer, were things that were directly related to the student's background. The hope is to make students aware of the problems of the ghetto and able to do something about them.

The method of teaching is also different from the traditional approach. There will be no failing grades given at FCC, only two or three shades of "pass." Lectures will be replaced, as much as possible, by secton-type seminar meetings, and when lectures are held, the hope is to make them "happenings" --movies, debates, discussions between students and faculty members, and the like. Innovation is the key at FC, innovation in terms of involving students more in the process of teaching.

"We want to make education a two-way street," one faculty member said this summer, "we want the students to teach us as much as we teach the students. But mostly we want to get the students to realize that by growing up in an urban environment, they have already learned and expressed a great deal."