After 30 years of stability and tacit cooperation in Ivy League financial aid, a January announcement by Princeton University set off a chain reaction that pushed five of the nation's top universities into increased generosity in a matter of months.

But as Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) all announced new outlays aimed at attracting middle class students, Harvard sat on the sidelines for an entire semester--true to an institutional tendency not to follow a trend it didn't start.

President Neil L. Rudenstine originally reacted with a pledge to keep Harvard's offers "within shouting distance" of competing schools. As the spring wore on, Byerly Hall officials made similar pledges of generosity without instituting formal change.

These pledges seemed to work--an 80 percent admissions yield had the potential to blunt arguments for changes in the aid policy.

But only last week, after two months of explaining themselves to the Class of 2002, the financial aid office and Rudenstine committed to a formal policy change by next October.

No one in Byerly or Mass. Hall is sure what form these changes will take, but it seems likely that they will include a general reduction in self-help requirements--loan and work-study commitments which were targeted by other universities in the first wave of this spring's financial aid revolution.

But it remains to be seen whether, without the urgency which a drop in yield would have created, Harvard's final move will be as generous as those of its competitors.

The Way It Used to Be

This spring's revolutionary aid changes upset a system of collaboration among Ivy aid offices which formally began in 1958, with the formation of the Overlap Group.

This consortium of Ivies and other top schools met every admissions season to make sure students admitted to several schools got roughly the same offer from each. Their back-room bargaining caught the attention of the Justice Department in 1991 and dissolved under threat of price-fixing charges.

But until this spring the spirit of the Overlap Group lived on, in an informal understanding that all former Group members would give all students roughly similar packages.

But after a semester of change, only two of U.S. News & World Report's top six colleges--Harvard and cash-strapped Duke University--still functionally adhere to the older system. With Harvard's departure in the fall, the Overlap Group system will be formally buried after 40 years.

Making Changes

"We kind of got out of step," said Princeton Director of Financial Aid Don Betterton in February, as his school became the first to break out of the Overlap consensus system.

Princeton's percentage of students receiving financial aid had dropped to 39 percent last year--an embarrassing five or six points below schools like Harvard in a era painfully conscious of diversity. Alumni were talking about a "lingering F. Scott Fitzgerald aura."