Four months ago, no financial aid officer would have believed the academic year could end so calmly. The 1983 budget proposed in February by President Reagan recommended some $2.3 billion in aid cuts for higher education and seemed to spell disaster for universities already strapped by inflation rates and dropping enrollments. Schools that could count on surviving--like Harvard, blessed with a plump endowment and the resources to raise more--expected painful soul-searching over whether they could maintain generous financial aid policies to guarantee equal access.

But the alarm sparked a lobbying movement unified and powerful enough to take both educators and congressional aides by surprise. Busloads of students and sacks of letters poured into the capital, university presidents testified before congressional committees and argued with Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell behind closed doors. Financial aid officials who once predicted the necessity of rolling back aid blind admissions and scraping together alternative loan plans this year now note, albeit cautiously, that congressional delays have made it almost inconceivable that sizeable cuts could take effect before October, when next year's final aid and loan applications are due.

All agree, though, that the reprieve is only temporary. Many, at Harvard, and elsewhere, have emerged from the initial panic feeling that the current situation cannot fast forever--and as a result are scrutinizing the long-range implications and philosophical underpinnings of present aid policies. Says Richard W. Black. University coordinator of financial aid, quoting a Washington colleague: "We've taken the bulkhead, but it's still a long way to Berlin."

Martha Lyman, director of financial aid for the College, divides the long-range questions unearthed by chaos into two groups. The first is practical: just how long can the College, and universities in general, expect to go on coming up with new grants and loans to finance the ever-growing costs of education? The second--uppermost in enough people's minds by March so that both President Bok and Yale's President A. Bartlett Giamatti devoted annual reports to the subject--concerns what responsibility, if any, the federal government actually bears to higher education.

Whatever they favor, educators are quick to credit Washington's ominous doings with one benefit. They have focused attention on massive aid programs which--though growing at a furious rate for the last 20 years--had never before been subjected to the kind of philosophical scrutiny that its defenders have recently had to summon up.

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Harvard's fight against the threatened cuts has proven to many administrators that the problem here is not primarily one of scraping up enough money to get by. Unlike the hundreds of institutions that rely on tuition. Harvard supplies about 70 percent of its aid budget itself from endowment income; when necessary, it also can draw on the Faculty's "unrestricted funds," according to Thomas J. O'Brien, vice-president for finances.

This year, the Faculty did come to the rescue, filling the gap left by departing federal funds, it voted to allocate almost $5 million in unrestricted funds to next year's financial aid budget. In fact, the average aid package offered to the Class of '86, admitted under aid-blind policies, actually increased in absolute terms, almost keeping pace with the rate of college costs increases.

Given the boost, College officials--even those who maintain there is still more cause for alarm than complacency--sound positively sanguine about the short-term dollar outlook for the fall. Long threatened more by what L. Fred Jewett '57, dean of admissions and financial aid, calls "erosion of fixed incomes" than by specific cuts, Harvard can hope for an easing of aid pressure as the inflation rate inches down; if the pattern continues, the income on the endowment may once again be able to keep pace with costs. The admissions office also stands to gain from the Harvard Campaign, now approaching $200 million. Aid officials say they have also been quietly assured that if the $250 million goal is increased, financial aid will claim a good portion of the addition.

"We're spending an enormous amount" on financial aid, notes Henry Rosovsky, dean of the Faculty, whom Jewett credits with pushing through the allocation of the extra $2 million. But while he is sanguine about the "forseeable future." Rosovsky suggests that "at some point we're not going to be able to do it any more--it depends on the Faculty's priorities." His concern echoes aid officials' assumption that any current funding innovations are little more than makeshift. Lyman and Jewett talk of "tinkering with the edges" and "belt-tightening" without altering the basic lines of College policy. But such modification in the short-run, they say, will not resolve any of the philosophical questions that eventually will demand scrutiny.

Rosovsky and O'Brien both cite faculty salaries as the only priority that could ever challenge financial aid in an ultimate economy squeeze. Given a choice between compromising the quality of faculty or of students. O'Brien says. "Both would probably give a little bit"; he does, however, cite the "special appeal" undergraduate financial aid has for alumni donors as a reason for some optimism.

Jewett, who took the year off from day-to-day admissions duties to study the chances and implications of adhering to the aid-blind approach, spent much of the spring going from House to House for dinner, talking to groups of students. One of his main questions was how much students felt it was worth straining to adhere to the ideal. How much more, he asked, could the available money be spread (in the form of work-study and loans rather than grants) before the pressure of a work-study job outweighed the benefits of being here at all?

On this question, Jewett says, he found undergraduates somewhat more resilient than he had expected. Accordingly, the average self-help package for next year has increased by some $500 in term-time earnings and some $100 for summer work.

Similar questions of "straining" students have taken on startling urgency in the controversy over guaranteed student loans, in some ways the program most victimized by Reagan's proposals. The president's budget called for a rules change that would bar all graduate and professional students from the low-interest loan program, while increasing starting fees and interest rates and tightening eligibility requirements for undergraduates. While some lobbyists and legislators considered the proposal so ridiculous as to be Reagan's "red herring," a bargaining chip in case outraged interest groups wanted to bargain, others viewed it as a threat touching on the troublesome question of just how much students can realistically be loaned in the first place.

Of all the assistance programs, most educators agree, the GSLs are the most in need of some sort of control. Ever since the Carter administration dramatically expanded eligibility for the loans and removed the maximum income ceiling altogether, the governmental cost of financing the loans has rocketed.