As federal grants and university money continue to dry up, graduate students and perspective graduate students are finding it more and more difficult to finance their education's.

And the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which has been consistently ranked among the top five grad schools in the nation, appears to be hurting as much as any other school, despite its superstar status.

Of the approximately 800 students offered places in next year's first-year class, about 360 decided not to come to Harvard.

Enrollment at the graduate school will thus decrease for the eighth consecutive year, probably resulting in fewer teaching fellows, less income for the Faculty's dwindling budget, and apparently a richer student body.

Although statistics on the number of students receiving financial aid have not yet been made available, last year the GSAS felt the first ill effects of the newly-revised Kraus Plan for financial aid, as it rejected about 10 per cent of the 1974-75 applicants ranked for admission because of their need for funding.

Under this plan, which sparked considerable controversy in 1973, departments are permitted to accept lower-ranked students who do not need financial aid and to skip over higher-ranked needy students.

Outside Harvard, traditional sources of graduate-student aid, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health and the Dan-forth Foundation to name a few, this year cut back on their money, a move that affects more than 1000 graduate students.

Harvard clearly did not gain so much as it lost, although in December Harvard officials did succeed in negotiating a $207,000 three-year grant that will ostensibly help graduate teaching fellows improve the quality of their teaching.

But the fact still remains that graduate students too need a way to support themselves, and the Dan-forth grant does not mask the deeper, more fundamental, money problems that the GSAS is facing.