NORTH OF HARVARD Yard a temple--or a ghetto--has been built for pre-meds. The Undergraduate Science Center opened last year, and like many pre-meds here, the building sits uncomfortably between the domains of the traditional Harvard Science departments. Perhaps it says something about the distances between academic departments that a building as big as the Science Center could fall between them, and perhaps it says something about Harvard that a group of people the size of the local pre-med population could collectively find themselves the uncomfortable step-children of the Chemistry, Biochemistry and Biology Departments at Harvard.

Pre-law and pre-business students do not face the pressures that pre-med students must. Law schools impose their own particular brand of hell--the Law School Aptitude Tests (LSATs)--but it is a much shorter one, lasting only an afternoon, rather than the nine months of Chem 20 (Harvard's frantically competitive organic chemistry course).

Of course, to see the "after Harvard what?" question as a choice between law, medical and business schools is too limited. Although year after year 90 per cent of each graduating class plans to attend a graduate school of some sort, only about 40 per cent go directly to graduate or professional study. Of the 60 per cent who do something else, a bare majority (31 per cent) look for some kind of job.

Students in that 31 per cent are not particularly well-qualified for many jobs. Harvard neither has nor is prepared to offer routine training for pre-medical, pre-law or pre-anything students. Harvard faculty members have never been able to become very excited about teaching vocational courses to undergraduates.

But in the last two years, Harvard undergraduates appear to have become somewhat more interested in taking, vocational courses, at least vocational courses of a sort. This results partly from a growing interest in medicine; partly from a job market that is growing permanently tighter; partly from the evident decay of student interest in other things (such as radical politics); and partly from a complementary trend for Harvard types to look for more private means of satisfaction.

These trends are relatively recent. The job market turned bad with the recession of 1970, but underlying economic conditions make a prolonged condition of structural underemployment for B.A. holders highly probable.

The turn toward pre-med study--Harvard's manifestation of a general national trend into the health professions--is very recent, so recent that OG&CP figures (based on the career preferences of graduating seniors) do not yet show the shift. But enrollment in the pre-med core curriculum have skyrocketed in the last two years, and the pre-med concentrations--biology, biochemistry and chemistry--have grown dramatically. Chem 20 is so big that the Chemistry Department has begun to exclude people from it.

The third agent contributing to students' increased vocational interest--the decay of political consciousness--is perhaps the most obvious, but also the most difficult factor to define. Certainly the style of the Harvard student has changed markedly in the last ten years, but his vocational inclinations do not seem to have undergone a parallel shift. Before, during and after the strikes of 1960 and 1970 about the same number of seniors planned to become lawyers and doctors.

But in the absence of any political commitment, students seem more careerists, whether or not they actually are. In a not particularly political atmosphere, it becomes easier for an undergraduate to admit and discuss the compromises he will make when he graduates. That kind of discussion has a way of bothering the fastidious, even if it reflects no real change.

WHERE THERE has been a real change is in the job market. The Harvard A.B. is no longer the final degree for the economic elite.

With the advent of mass higher education, a bachelor's degree is not worth what it once was--it has lost its scarcity value. Even the Harvard A.B. is not the magic carpet to success and fortune that some people once thought it was. Nowadays it certainly isn't the sure-fire ticket into a law or medical school--which it once really was.

For anyone at Harvard to cash in on his sheepskin, the figures are a little discouraging. In the 1970s, 10 million B.A. degrees will be granted, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Through retirements about 3 million jobs currently held by college graduates will open up to new employees.

Economic expansion will generate another 3 million jobs comparable to those already held by college graduates. These jobs will be primarily in government and health services.

But a third of the 10 million newly-minted college graduates will be employed in jobs that the BLS euphemistically claims will be "upgraded." Upgraded jobs are jobs previously held by non-college graduates: clerical jobs, sales jobs, para-professional jobs. The country is apparently headed for a bad case of structural underemployment-large numbers of people will be overqualified for the positions available to them.

Francis D. Fisher, director of the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning, believes that these figures may be over optimistic, and that the number of underemployed college graduates may reach 4 or 5 million by the end of the decade.