January 23, 1982

Columbia College, the last all-male college in the Ivy League, announced yesterday that it would begin accepting women as freshmen in the fall of 1983. An agreement between Columbia University and Barnard College, its sister institution, has also been revised to allow Barnard increased control over the appointment of tenured faculty members. Barnard will continue to function as an undergraduate college for women. The announcements, made jointly by the two institutions, brought to an end more than a year and a half of negotiations. The negotiations were aimed at increasing cooperation between the two colleges, although Columbia College had wanted to preserve its status as an all-male institution. While these negotiations proved unsuccessful, the presidents of both institutions hailed the agreement yesterday as a positive step.

Consumer prices rose four-tenths of 1 percent in December, the Labor Department reported today, bringing the rise for 1981 to only 8.9 percent, the lowest annual increase since 1977. A slowing in price increases across the board, except in medical care , contrib uted to the improvement for the year. In addition to the impact of the recession, inflation was slowed by unexpectedly small increas es in food and energy prices, a decline at the end of the year in h ousing costs and a drop in interest rates. Medical care costs, however, rose 12.5 percent during the year, the largest jump since World War II. Rate Trend Lower At the end of the year, the rate of inflation was even lower than for 1981 as a whole. In the last three months, the Consumer Price Index was rising at an annual rate of 5.3 percent. The December increase, if it continued for 12 months, would translate into an annual rate of 5.2 percent. But while many economists expect inflation to continue to slow down, they do not predict it will continue at December's low rate.

A clandestine rebel radio station said today that two United States military advisers took part in a Salvadoran Army attack this month in which 70 civilians were slain.

The snow lies deep and fresh in the gentle valleys and hollows between the shadowed ridgelines here, so that when game animals move in the woods, they leave clear tracks for the hunter's eye. The town is a small splotch of population, 18,000 people on the side of the Massachusetts Turnpike as it races west across the state 80 miles from Boston. The trees press close in on the town, which fingers back among the trees, and the woods often ring at this time of year with the rifles of hunters after game. Sometimes the bullets whine too close, so that the workers picking over the piles of car parts in the field behind Eddie Godin's Ludlow Auto Salvage Company go running to the shelter of the yard's green metal office on Highway 21, which is Center Street, the main road through town. ''That,'' says Mr. Godin, with a grim and ruddy smile, ''is why I don't hunt.'' But many of his neighbors do, and the whine and pok of stray bullets here are accepted as a fact of life.

The Reagan Administration today formally linked progress in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union to Moscow's involvement in what it called ''the continuing repression of the Polish people.'' Dean Fischer, the State Department spokesman, said the Administration's ''interest in meaningful arms reduction negotiations, including reductions in strategic arms, is undiminished.'' But Mr. Fischer went on to say that talks on reducing strategic nuclear arsenals ''cannot be insulated from other events.'' ''Indeed, the Secretary has emphasized that the continuing repression of the Polish people - in which Soviet responsibility is clear - obviously constitutes a major setback to the prospects for constructive East-West relations,'' he said. ''There can be no question but that the climate of East-West relations in turn has a serious effect upon the prospects for moving forward in arms control.''