August 14, 1984

THE rapid rate of increase in college costs has finally begun to drop, according to a survey by the College Board. After three years of annual increases of 10 to 11 percent in the cost of going to college, students and their families will have to cope with an increase of only 6 percent this fall, the College Board said yesterday. ''The slowdown in cost increases is good news for college students and their families,'' George H. Hanford, president of the College Board, said in announcing the results of the survey. ''And since most students do not attend the most costly public or private colleges, in fact individual expenses for the majority are likely to be at or below the national average.''

Thousands of people marched here today to protest the death of a man killed by police officers trying to arrest an American supporter of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. The victim, Sean Downes, was in the crowd that had gathered Sunday at an I.R.A. rally to hear Martin Galvin, publicity director of the New York-based Northern Irish Aid Committee, called Noraid, which supports the I.R.A. Mr. Downes was struck by a plastic bullet as policemen charged the crowd in an unsuccessful attempt to arrest Mr. Galvin, who had been barred from Northern Ireland by the British authorities. Mr. Galvin escaped. The march tonight was peaceful and at most times silent. Earlier in the day, there was scattered violence in West Belfast as youths burned cars, and after the march tonight some roadblocks were built and set on fire.

After impressing the financial community with the cost-cutting business practices it brought to the for-profit hospital field, Humana Inc. is now focusing on impressing the medical community by providing the most advanced hospital technology that money can buy. The company, whose 17,000 beds represent 2 percent of the national total, is doing this by expanding and upgrading its emergency rooms and operating suites. But more importantly, it is increasing the kinds of medical specialties available in many of its acute-care hospitals, even though the market share of for-profit hospitals has been declining. ''Humana is trying to become the most sophisticated in the marketplace,'' said David Lotson, an analyst at Paine Webber in Manhattan.

Antoinette Hatfield said today that she had received $55,000, not $40,000, from a Greek businessman whose trans-African pipeline venture was strongly endorsed by her husband, Senator Mark O. Hatfield. Senator Hatfield said he had made ''an error in judgment'' in failing to realize the possible public perception of his support of the pipeline and of the payments to Mrs. Hatfield. The Senate Ethics Committee and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are conducting separate inquiries of the circumstances. ''Nothing I can say today will change the past,'' Senator Hatfield said. ''You can't unscramble an egg. But I join my wife, Antoinette, to take such steps as I have. We've decided to give to charity an amount exactly equal to those fees which she received.''

LOS BANOS, THE PHILIPPINES IN the shadow of verdant tropical mountains, scientists have developed a number of promising new strains of rice in an effort to extend the Green Revolution to the hundreds of millions of Asians it has thus far failed to reach. The new varieties promise to give high yields without the costly irrigation required by the earlier ''miracle'' rice strains developed at the International Rice Research Institute here. The new strains have not yet been tested in farmers' fields, but one particularly promising variety has produced test yields more than twice as large as those from traditional varieties. If this and other new varieties being developed are successful, the resulting increase in the production of rice in nonirrigated areas would benefit the diets and household incomes of many of the two billion people, mostly in the developing countries of Asia, who eat rice as their staple and sell any surplus in good years. From 1960 to 1980, average yields in tropical Asia increased 40 percent, and the development of high-yielding varieties of rice was one of the main reasons for the improvement. But in the poorest nations that need it most - half the food energy consumed in developing nations comes from rice - the benefits of this Green Revolution have been limited, largely because these countries are least able to afford the irrigation and commercial fertilizer that make it possible.