Fisher also said that--although he doubts many Harvard graduates will end up on the bottom of the heap, permanently filing insurance policies under "H"--he expects a "bumping process" to reach right on up the line. Harvard College seniors will face more competition for jobs, and often they will have to settle for less desirable positions.

He also predicted that "bumping" would affect the prospects for Harvard professional school graduates: "In five years, the lower half of a Harvard Law School class isn't going to get the kind of offers we got when I got out."

According to Fisher, the Harvard undergraduate "doesn't know these figures, but he's got a feel for the problem." Harvard students may not analyze general economic trends, but they do a fine job reflecting them. Unfortuantely, reflecting general economic trends can be a little painful, especially when the economy is tight or the competition for places is growing worse.

THE PRE-MED students at Harvard are probably worst caught in the squeeze, since the competition for med school places is bad. They are the students who must take vocational training while in college--the five courses all medical schools require of applicants.

Since all pre-meds meet each other in head-to-head competition in those five courses, they can become real cutthroat experiences. Even after discounting stories of pre-meds sabotaging each other's labs, the degree of competition and amount of emotion involved in the courses is apalling.

And the stories contribute to the generally bad reputation pre-meds acquire. The stereotype of a pre-med as an incredibly competitive, point-grubbing individual who is in medicine for the money may miss the mark. But anyone who agressively advertises himself as a pre-med will probably be detested.

Terry Walsh, of the Bureau of Study Counsel and Currier House's new pre-med advisor, divides pre-meds into three groups. The first encompasses people who are genuinely interested in the natural sciences, plan to go to medical school, and are in no way troubled by the pre-med requirements because they would take the courses anyway.

The second set of people includes those not interested in the natural sciences, who take their pre-med requirements in a fifth year as a special student. By concentrating in an area he genuinely likes, this pre-med will presumably compile a better track record than he would if he studied in one of the areas traditionally thought to appeal to med schools (such as biology or chemistry).

Walsh emphasized that medical schools do not discriminate against applicants who concentrate outside the natural sciences, and that following one's own inclinations would probably enhance the chances of getting into medical school, insofar as it resulted in a better transcript.

Walsh's third class of pre-meds is the group that slipped into a science major only because the prospect of fulfilling concentration requirements and pre-med requirements with the same set of courses seemed economical. They end up in their concentration without ever really deciding to enter it.

"I would not put my money on these people," Walsh said. "A student will blow half his education before he realizes he should sit down and think about what he wants to do."

Pre-law students are less likely than pre-meds to fall into the trap of seeking a surrogate for the sorts of activity they will be doing in professional school. Law school admissions usually depend on grade point average and law board scores. Potential lawyers are not expected to take any particular set of courses, which eliminates one source of the tensions pre-meds face; and law school admissions are not as competitive as medical school admissions, which mitigates another source of pressure.

An additional factor distinguishes the medical school applicant situation from that of the law school applicant. Law school is becoming a place to go to avoid making a career choice.

Although the number of seniors telling OG&CP that their eventual vocation will be law has remained the same for ten years, the number of people planning to go to law school has increased by 50 per cent in the same ten years. As one House pre-law advisor remarked, "They [students] see Howard Cosell on television and want to become a lawyer."

WHAT ALL THIS means to Harvard is not clear yet. In part, the University must face the problem of reconciling its commitment to a liberal arts education with the demands being make upon its graduates. The problems pre-meds face in the five courses they must take to apply to medical school are the most pressing in this area. Harvard's faculty has never and probably never will be very receptive to teaching vocationally oriented courses on a large scale, but the pre-meds have a specific set of problems that must be dealt with.

The traditional idea of a liberal arts education has been progressively mangled by competing educational theories, and the contention that pre-professional grounding in a traditional academic discipline like undergraduate training to be a historian constitutes a liberal arts education is unlikely to prevail.

All parties agree that the Harvard undergraduate education must become more useful to the student, although not necessarily more useful economically. Like most Harvard debates, the issue will probably be resolved on some middle ground: giving pre-meds more help with their particular problems, doing nothing at all for the potential blue-collar workers in each Harvard class, and cooperating with the professional schools in devising more and more quantitative ways to measure each students success.

But the College faces one problem that is its own, as an institution, and which the students wanting to get a job or into medical school needn't worry about directly. For the first time since 1636, Harvard doesn't produce the end product of the educational mill. Most of its students get their final polish somewhere else. George Orwell went to Eton but did not then attend a British university, a procedure which today seems odd. In a few years, it may seem as odd to go to Harvard College and then not attend a graduate school of some sort.