What was going on when I was born?

CONCERNED that they may be caught short with low enrollments as a result of cutbacks in student aid and economic uncertainty, many private colleges, including some of the nation's most prestigious, have increased the number of applicants they are accepting for next September's freshman class and have expanded their waiting lists. College officials say they are particularly concerned that students from lower-income families and those whose parents never attended college will decide that they cannot afford the high cost of a private college education. Many colleges that pride themselves on their ethnic and economic mix are concerned that this could change the makeup of their enrollments, limiting them for the most part to students from affluent families. ''What we have to do is be as aggressive as possible in the recruitment process and make clear our financial-aid policy,'' said James Wickendon, dean of admissions at Princeton University, which accepted 2,066 applicants for next year's freshman class of 1,130. The university accepted 50 more applicants than it did last year to fill the same sized class.

A Saudi Arabian group, in a major Arab entry into Western European industry, has acquired a 17.87 percent share of IBH Holding A.G., the West German construction machinery group that is partly owned by the General Motors Corporation, IBH announced today. The acquisition will make the Saudis and General Motors the largest IBH shareholders, with equal participation. The deal with the Saudis is part of an IBH program to raise $64.6 million in much-needed new equity capital for the seven-year-old company, which has grown through acquisitions into the world's third-largest construction machinery company.

A report on April 26 in the Advertising column of Business Day incorrectly stated a relationship between American Telephone and Telegraph Company and Executone phones. Executone phones are produced by Executone Inc., a unit of the Continental Telephone Company.

covered land at the edge of the Atlantic coastal plain, has been producing plutonium and tritium for nuclear warheads. Now it is here that scientists are preparing to take the first momentous step in this country toward permanent disposal of the enormous quantities of radioactive waste generated. The Energy Department, which owns the plant, and E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, which operates it, got sidetracked for years on a controversial plan to pump the noxious liquids far below ground into caverns cut into the bedrock. But after critics complained that the wastes might leak into the Tuscaloosa aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the Southeast, that approach was abandoned. Now the scientists are concentrating on an entirely different solution: solidification of the wastes in a leak-resistant glassy form held in stainless steel containers, for eventual burial in a safer location at least 2,000 feet underground. Last week the Senate passed a bill that would expedite the Government's search for a final burial site and would limit the ability of states to block a repository within their borders. That is the second step in a program whose first phase - solidification of the wastes - is starting here.

''Anybody who says that what we are trying to do is corny doesn't understand how fragile this democracy is.'' - Frank J. Macchiarola, Schools Chancellor, on new citizenship course. (B1:5.)

Concerned about antisocial behavior among many youngsters, the Board of Education has begun a broad new effort to teach the responsibilities of citizenship in New York City's public schools. The program, which is to be announced at the school system's Law Day ceremony tomorrow, will start next fall with the introduction of a 307-page curriculum guide containing lessons for students from kindergarten through the 12th grade. It is an approach that school authorities hope will not arouse the kind of controversy that has sometimes been associated with attempts to inculcate values in youngsters. ''Anybody who says that what we are trying to do is corny doesn't understand how fragile this democracy is,'' said Frank J. Macchiarola, the city's Schools Chancellor. ''Not enough people understand what the Bill of Rights is and what the values of a democracy are.''

Warren M. Anderson, the Senate Republican leader, announced tonight that the Senate would let stand virtually all of Governor Carey's $941 million in budget vetoes. Mr. Anderson's unexpected move appeared to end the state's 33-day budget dispute. ''This is finality,'' he declared. Governor Carey agreed, issuing a statement saying he was ''pleased'' with the Senate's decision. It would, he said, allow him to certify the budget as balanced and permit the state's $3.5 billion spring borrowing to go forward. The borrowing pays aid to New York City and the state's school districts.

The United States Supreme Court today rejected an appeal by the State Senate's Republicans to defer reapportionment of the New York State Legislature until next year, and officials here said the decision cleared the way for agreement by the end of the week on new lines for Congressional State Senate and State Assembly districts. Republicans and Democrats are close to agreement on a plan that would strengthen Democratic control of the Assembly and Republican control of the Senate. The state's Congressional delegation, which is shrinking by five members, would lose two Democrats and two Republicans. A fifth seat would be filled from a district created in a way that gives either party a chance to win.

WHEN a man asked his insurance company to reimburse him for $14,000 worth of primal-scream therapy, during which he had spent many hours screaming to relieve himself of various traumas, the company refused to pay and the judge ruled that it did not have to. Primal therapy was not a ''usual and customary treatment'' for his condition, the judge agreed. And Medicare patients who suffer from schizophrenia can no longer be reimbursed for vitamin therapy - just one of the procedures that the Health Care Financing Administration, which oversees some $68 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funds, has begun to disallow after finding no medical justification for them. In the past few years such ''third party'' insurers have been dragging America's providers of mental health services into a new era of accountability for the results of their treatments. ''It is society's right to determine what it will pay for,'' says Dr. Morris D. Parloff, chief of the psychotherapy and behavioral intervention section of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Like most of the others who moved here to work on the nearby Colony Oil Shale Project, Jerry Ferguson figured he was making a solid investment when he sank most of his life savings last February into a new $72,000 home. Now Mr. Ferguson, who is 40 years old, is among several thousand employees and their families out of work and facing an uncertain future, following a surprise decision Sunday by the Exxon Company U.S.A. to shut down its partly completed, $5 billion project in Colorado's Piceance Basin. ''In six months, this is all going to be a ghost town,'' said Mr. Ferguson, a construction supervisor whose home is one of nearly two dozen on a dusty street in a new subdivision in Battlement Mesa, the planned community which - until Sunday - Exxon had been carving out of a bluff near here to eventually house some 25,000 people drawn to the area by the Colony project. ''With Exxon in it, and with oil prices as they are, I just thought that this project would be more stable than most. I guess I was wrong.''

THE herpes viruses, among the most ubiquitous, persistent and resistant of infectious organisms, are fast gaining notoriety as a cause of human ills. Indeed, every species of animal seems to have evolved with its own contingent of disease-causing herpes viruses, and few herpes infections in any species have thus far proved curable or preventable. In fact, says Dr. Clyde Crumpacker of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, one of a legion of researchers currently battling these stubborn organisms, the five herpes viruses that infect human beings are now believed to cause more illness than any other group of viruses. Two members of the herpes family are leading suspects in research efforts to prove that viruses cause human cancers, including cancer of the cervix. Though herpes is currently best known by name as the cause of a worldwide epidemic of venereal disease, this virus family plagues people of all ages and circumstances: The fetus may be devastated by cytomegalovirus, the child bespotted by chicken pox, the adolescent felled by infectious mononucleosis, the adult pestered by recurrent cold sores, the aged agonized by shingles.

The Defense Ministry reported today that missilefiring British helicopters sank an Argentine patrol vessel and damaged another ship early this morning in a clash off the Falkland Islands. The attack came 10 hours after a British submarine torpedoed the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano. British military sources said tonight they believed that the cruiser had sunk. In Buenos Aires, an Argentine communique confirmed that the ship, which carried a crew of 1,042 men, had been lost.