A Resurrection
Vernon, Grenville
KEEPING OUT OF COLLEGE By DON C. SEITZ ' I ^ HE newest problem of the day is how to keep our young -1 men and women out of college. They are pressing against the gates of standard institutions...
...Its virtue is loudly proclaimed, so much so that President Morgan can hardly attend to his duties...
...There ought to be some way of establishing an average...
...For example, the much heralded Antioch system of interlarding industry with education keeps a boy under tutelage six years...
...Columbia has become a great congeries, that, thanks to being located in a metropolis, has limitless room for accommodation...
...That remains pretty much the same old thing...
...This is not the case in "college towns," where education is the sole industry...
...This is all over now...
...They are pressing against the gates of standard institutions in brigades, and none may stay them...
...There seems to be a real scare afoot lest too many people will learn too much to be useful...
...Professors want more pay with increased instruction...
...Young gentlemen graduates found it hard to place themselves, and harder still to get along after they were placed...
...Eight years of "higher" study await the law and medical student...
...Getting over college used to be the problem...
...Calls for more endowment follow in unceasing sequence...
...Everybody who hears it, comes...
...The question then remains—Will they go...
...Thousands are turned away, but like the march of the lemmings, the procession keeps on...
...They were treated as greenhorns and patronized by those who came up from the ranks...
...To one who never attended college these things seem to be an undue interference with the rights of man...
...It would look as though something of «the sort were under way...
...Getting in, and getting out, are now the perplexities...
...What is the cause of the crush...
...He has to be on the road most of the time expounding it...
...With the immigration laws shutting out muscle, and the professions and corporations setting up a monopoly in brain requirements, it would appear that there is a deliberate attempt under way to force Americans back to the mines, so to speak...
...Everything is expanding except the course of study...
...Somebody will have to...
...If the college was superlative in its output there might be purpose in the policy...
...Higher education (or perhaps it is athletics) is the call of the hour...
...lest some will not learn enough...
...Beleaguered faculties cry out for help, but in vain...
...As it is, it appears to be class discrimination, most unfairly exercised...
...Time was when the college product was considered inferior in industry...
...Another is the policy of many corporations, notably the Standard Oil Company, that they will give no one a position without a diploma as his chief recommendation...
...Stephen Leacock once wrote a genial skit about the Harvard trustee who was devising a plan whereby one would never need to leave that eminent institution of learning when once matriculated...
...For one thing, the new requirement of law and medicine that students in these lines must have four years of college before they can continue their ambitions, has something to do with it...
...bed and board are becoming difficult...
...Classrooms are not alone cramped...
...The graduates in the latter professions will have no trouble in accumulating the bald heads and whiskers considered so desirable before hanging out a shingle in these employments...
...When you add to this the inability of colleges to accommodate the rush, it becomes cruel and unjust...
...They are the pets of business, law and medicine...
Vol. 3 • November 1925 • No. 3
