I got my PhD in Math from Harvard in 1979. Based on http://abel.harvard.edu/dissertations/index.html http://abel.harvard.edu/dissertations/index.html, it seems

I got my PhD in Math from Harvard in 1979. Based on http://abel.harvard.edu/dissertations/index.html http://abel.harvard.edu/dissertations/index.html, it seems that 5-10 folks per year did that in those days. Perhaps 20% went on to research careers big enough to have Wikipedia articles now -- mainly in academia, although there's one in industrial cryptography (Don Coppersmith) and another in finance. Most of the rest have had decent careers in academia or business. However, I don't recall grants -- beyond grad school fellowships or whatever -- playing a major role in pure math at that time.