Most years one or two graduating seniors in R.O.T.C. are commissioned as officers, according to Jerry Hill, a Yale administrator who oversees the program. Next spring there will be none. At Harvard in June, eight graduates were commissioned, in all three military branches. The year before, there were five.

Image SYMBOLS Anthony Runco, left, and Taylor Giffen as cadets at Yale, at the Memorial Quadrangle Gate (forged with crests of the armed services). Credit... Joyce Dopkeen for The New York Times

These modest numbers come even though, in the last five years, the Army has nearly tripled the amount of money it has put into R.O.T.C. scholarships, to $263 million, and increased enrollment nationwide by 26 percent, to 30,721 students, to fill vacancies in its officer corps. It has been a time when military recruiters in all branches, working in a depressed economy, are ­acing their quotas. At Texas A&M, 115 freshmen in 2008 received Army R.O.T.C. scholarships, compared with 35 the year before. The military has a lot at stake: 60 percent of all new Army officers each year come from R.O.T.C. programs.

R.O.T.C. students at Harvard and Yale are not the only ones campus-hopping. Harvard is one of eight colleges served by M.I.T., the Army R.O.T.C. host school. Five of these satellite colleges — Wellesley, Tufts, Gordon, Endicott and Salem State — have arranged for transportation for their cadets to get to M.I.T. Several colleges in the consortium have the R.O.T.C. staff travel to their campuses to conduct military classes and physical training, making it easier on their students.

Harvard, with its campus ban, does neither.

One of the featured speakers at the 2009 Harvard commissioning ceremony, Darnell Whitt II, a retired naval captain, noted that the year he graduated from Harvard — 1959 — 121 seniors were commissioned as officers. He told the R.O.T.C. students that he was sorry their numbers were so few and that he hoped that by the time they returned for their 50th reunion, “the current issues about military matters at Harvard will have been resolved and there will be a closer connection between the great university and those in uniform.”

THIS is the 40th anniversary of the antiwar protests that led to the ban of R.O.T.C. at some of the nation’s most elite universities — Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Tufts. And yet, the attitude on these campuses today is hardly antimilitary. There are numerous signs of genuine respect for the soldiers who serve. An editorial last May in the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, which for decades attacked R.O.T.C., praised classmates who had joined the program. “They demonstrate a commitment to service that should be admired and followed by the rest of the student body,” The Crimson said. The Yale, Columbia and Brown student papers have all published editorials in the recent past calling for the return of R.O.T.C. to their campuses.

R.O.T.C. members interviewed at Harvard, M.I.T. and Yale said they rarely if ever heard negative comments around campus, and a few said they had experienced the opposite problem.

“People stop me and thank me for serving,” said Gregory Wellman, an Army R.O.T.C. cadet at M.I.T. “It’s a little awkward because at this point I’m just a student and haven’t done anything.”