Cordelia Cox, a retired consultant on education to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare who also consulted on social work issues for the United Nations, died of renal failure March 5 at a retirement home in Richmond. She had suffered a hip fracture.

She lived in the Washington area off and on from the 1960s until Janu­ary, when she moved from Goodwin House in Alexandria to Richmond. She was a native of Tennessee and a graduate of the College of William and Mary. She received a master's degree in social work from the Uni­versity of North Carolina and honor­ary doctorates from Gettysburg Col­lege in Pennsylvania and Upsala College in New Jersey.

She taught at high schools in Southern Virginia and at what is now Virginia Commonwealth University early in her career. For a decade after World War II, she was a director of a Lutheran program that resettled more than 56,000 European refugees in the United States and Canada. . Until 1961, she was executive sec­retary of the Lutheran Welfare Coun­cil of Metropolitan New York. Until 1974, she was a consultant to such agencies as the Office of Manpower Development and Training of the S0­cial and Rehabilitation Service at HEW and a fellowship program of the United Nations. At 73, she joined the Peace Corps and served in Western Samoa, devel­oping a social science curriculum for secondary schools. She was a member of the National Association of Social Workers, the board of Wagner College and Luther­an Church of the Reformation in Washington.

Survivors include two sisters Mary Cox Moncure of Richmond and Elizabeth Cox White of Orlando; and a brother, C. Brown Cox of Raymore, Mo.