HEADLINE: 23 COLLEGES IN EAST ADJUST AID TO AVERT BIDDING FOR STUDENTS

BYLINE: By FOX BUTTERFIELD, Special to the New York Times

   For two decades officials representing a group of select Eastern colleges have met privately to insure that a student seeking financial aid was offered roughly the same amount by each school.

''Some people tease us and say it's price fixing, but it's not,'' said Amy Nychis, director of financial aid at Wellesley, where officials of 23 schools met last week. ''The basic purpose is to give students and their parents the freedom of choice to go to the school they really want and not to pick because one school offers them more aid than another.''

Another purpose, some college officials acknowledge, is to help the schools stretch their financial aid budgets and avoid possible bidding wars over the most attractive students.

In some cases college officials may raise or lower their financial aid offers to a student after seeing what other schools have offered. The meetings, which are not widely known about by students and parents, grew out of the shift in the late 1950's and early 1960's from scholarships based on academic or athletic ability toward aid based entirely on need.

But some officials at this year's meeting were surprised when two of the participating schools, Smith and Mount Holyoke, disclosed that they were introducing a new program to attract top students by offering cash grants regardless of need.

Although administrators at Smith and Mount Holyoke insisted the new awards were not merit aid because the amounts were relatively small, only $300 or $400 apiece, officials at several schools said they were concerned that the action might put pressure on other colleges to offer their own financial inducements as the number of college-age students declines.

[A] ''I think all of us would prefer Smith and Mount Holyoke not do it,'' a financial aid officer at another small New England college said. ''It's a crack in the dike. The question arises, if they don't get the students with that amount of money, how much more will they offer, and won't other schools follow?''

Several colleges outside the 23-member group, including Northwestern and Duke, have recently begun offering some merit-based scholarships to attract top students as part of what some university officials said might be the beginning of a national trend.
 
Discrepancies Resolved

The annual meeting at Wellesley came after the colleges made their final selection of high school seniors and a week before today's mailing of acceptance notices to students.

The participating colleges were the eight members of the Ivy League (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale), Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a group called the Pentagonials, consisting of Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Colby, Tufts, Middlebury and Trinity.

Seamus Malin, director of financial aid at Harvard, said that in most cases the school officials were ''fairly much in agreement'' on how much aid a student would need and how much the parents should contribute.

But in about a third of the cases there are ''wide discrepancies,'' which Mr. Malin described as $2,000 to $3,000. That, he noted, is still a small amount of the total cost of a year's education at an Ivy League school, which will range up from the $13,200 charged at Cornell this year, with all fees included.

It is these larger variations in proposed aid that the officials try to resolve in their annual conferences by either raising or lowering their offers to students.

There is no rule requiring the schools to agree on the amount of parental contribution for a student who has been accepted at several colleges, Mr. Malin explained, but the officers generally narrow their differences to within $100 or so.

''It is a delicate issue in a sense,'' he conceded. ''But there is nothing sneaky going on. It is not the Ivies getting together and dividing the talent.''

School officials are normally close in their assessments of each student's needs, Mr. Malin said, because they work with standardized information and methods.

Every applicant for financial aid must first submit a form disclosing his parents' income and assets to the College Scholarship Service in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Educational Testing Service. The service analyzes this form by computer and sends the results to each school to which the student has applied.

The colleges then make their own analyses, Mr. Malin said, and it is at this stage that the variations in aid arise. A particular school may request more data from the parents, or an applicant may have a brother or sister at one of the colleges, which provides that school with additional financial information.
 
'Bidding' on Aid Denied

Financial aid officers at several of the colleges strongly denied that any member of their group would increase an aid offer after the meeting to entice a student coveted by the school, such as a bright young scientist or football player.

''There is a lot of pressure not to do that,'' said Jacqueline Foster, director of the undergraduate financial aid office at Yale. She added that ''it would get back to you very quickly'' because the parents might go to another college to see if they could get a higher offer there, too.

Nevertheless, an official at Brown said, some colleges might try to make their offer more attractive by raising the amount of grant assistance. Each aid package is made up of three parts: a grant, a loan and self-help work provided by the school.

More controversial are the grants based on a student's ability rather than need. A spokesman for Smith, Ann Shanahan, said the school had decided to award 36 achievement awards of $300 each to "the students we most want to have come to Smith."

"We don't think of them as merit aid because the amounts are so small," she said, adding that the money for the grants came from special funds designated by the administration and not out of regular aid allocations.

Pat Waters, director of financial aid at Mount Holyoke, said her school would provide 30 students with grants of $400 each regardless of financial need. She described them as "prizes" rather than aid, because, she said, "The amount isn't large enough to make anyone change their mind."

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH