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In spite of all the talk about the coming tidal wave of students and the great shortage of teachers in higher education, there has been only one significant national effort to encourage top college students to go into college teaching. Founded at Princeton University in 1945, the National Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program has been awarding up to 174 grants a year for graduate work, but the talented young men and women it has thus channeled into the profession represent only a fraction of the numbers needed. Last week the program got a windfall that will enable it for the next five years to increase its annual grants to 1,000. The windfall: $25 million from the Ford Foundation.

Of the total amount, $11 million will finance $2,200 grants to get promising students through their first year of graduate study. Another $10 million will go to universities to help graduate students, whether Woodrow Wilson fellows or not, beyond their first year. In addition, $2,800,000 will finance an intensive recruiting campaign to be waged by more than 100 facultymen at 1,000 campuses across the U.S. The whole idea, says Vice President Clarence Faust of the Ford Foundation, is not only to train more teachers but to get the best: "The quality of higher education will not be served by meeting the faculty shortage with inadequately prepared people or by training those of mediocre ability."

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