October 27, 1983

The Trans World Corporation, in a five-hour directors' meeting in San Francisco yesterday, approved plans to spin off its Trans World Airlines subsidiary as a separate company. The company said no details of the board's action would be available until today. But based on tentative outlines of the proposal, stockholders would receive 93 shares in the airline for each 100 shares of common stock they now hold in the parent company. The spinoff - which will require shareholder approval at a meeting in December - was viewed as Trans World's response to an unsuccessful proxy fight by Odyssey Partners last summer to dismember the company.

The first Americans to be evacuated from Grenada since the United States invasion arrived here this evening. Some knelt and kissed the ground after they stepped from an Air Force C-141 transport plane and others whooped to express their pleasure to be home. ''I don't think there's any more beautiful sight than the United States,'' said Jean Joel of Albany, N.Y. ''And the rangers who arrived to save us.'' She was one of 69 Americans and two Britons, all of them students at St. George's University School of Medicine, who arrived on the first plane to bring people off the tiny Caribbean island since American marines and soldiers invaded Tuesday.

AnAppraisal NEW HAVEN, Oct. 24 - Long ago, the British magazine Punch called the undergraduate colleges of Yale ''a stage set made in Hollywood for a musical about Oxford,'' and it was partly right. Yale's 12 colleges were conceived as buildings that would remind their occupants of someplace else. But if these buildings were inspired by a yearning to be elsewhere, after half a century the colleges have come to symbolize New Haven far more than Oxford or Cambridge. It says much about the quality of the architecture of this campus that today these buildings call to mind not medieval universities at all, but Yale itself. The division of Yale 50 years ago into a system of undergraduate residential colleges, each with its own master, dean and dining hall, was intended as a means of breaking down the scale of the university, even then growing too large for easy social contact.

The invasion of Grenada is advancing ''extremely well'' and only one major area of resistance remains, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said. He said that American losses stood at six killed, eight missing and 33 wounded. Mr. Weinberger said he was unable to provide any casualty figures for Grenadian and Cuban forces and had no word of any civilian casualties. He reported, however, that about 600 Cubans had been captured. (Page A1, Column 6.) Cuban resistance in Grenada reportedly ended, but American troops battled Grenadian soldiers and militiamen in crowded areas of the capital. The United States flew in hundreds of paratroopers to bolster the force of 1,900 marines and Army Rangers that invaded the island early Tuesday with soldiers from seven Caribbean island countries. (A1:5.)

Quotation of the Day ''We got a lot more resistance than we expected.'' - Gen. John W. Vessey Jr. (A23:1.)