The Sisseton Weekly Standard

WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO COLLEGE?

Within the next six weeks thousands of young men and young women of South Dakota will decide upon the momentous question of where they will go to college. We use the adjective advisedly, for it certainly is a momentous time in the life of a young man or young woman, when for the first time he or she breaks from the home environment and enters a sphere of life quite apart from that lived under the protecting influence of the home.

It is primarily because the colleges of South Dakota keep the youth of the state in closer touch with the home life, because they are governed and protected by influences largely akin to those of the home, that the institutions of higher learning in this state should have a special appeal to parents who know the perils which surround their young people, once they pass over the threshold of home life into the new environment.

But it is not in this, alone, that the colleges of South Dakota base their claim to first thought in the minds of prospective students and their parents, in their selection of a college. While our schools are none too richly endowed with financial wealth, they have at least passed beyond the experimental stage in which they were handicapped for want of equipment, and they have that richer endowment, born of a spirit of genuine loyalty, and fastened by unquenchable desire for service.

The smaller college has more to offer its students of genuine character-development than those which count their students by the thousands, and after all character-development and the creation of a desire for service, are the only reasons why colleges should be supported. The small college has more to offer in personal attention of the men and women who compose the faculties of the institutions of learning. A freshman or sophomore in one of the larger colleges or universities has absolutely no affiliation with the men of large reputation and wide-known names who compose their faculties.

The larger colleges make a place for the more brilliant students, but lacks that spirit for developing the individuality of the plodder, the boy or girl with limited means, the one who needs to be educated in the sense of being drawn out, which is so vital a part of the life of the smaller colleges. There is, in the atmosphere of struggle, in which the South Dakota colleges have been reared, a dominating spirit which makes their students courageous contenders for the honors of the school and valiant fighters for the ideals which are fostered there after they have been graduated into the world of activity for which the school is preparatory.

There is another advantage which South Dakota students will find, in attending a South Dakota college:

The friendships which will be formed there are among those who, in later life will be engaged in the busy work of this state. A young man, attending any one of South Dakota's colleges for four years, will, at the close of that time, find himself the possessor of friendships which extend into every city, town and hamlet in the commonwealth--men and women interested in his welfare, and themselves building for the accomplishment of the same ideals; while the seeker of knowledge within the halls of some distant college or university, will return to the state four years hence, to find himself a stranger among the thousands who are starting in life at the same time.

A score of other, minor reasons might be advanced, as to why South Dakota's young people should attend South Dakota's colleges, but all others aside, this matter of friendships and their consequent advantage to the joy of living as well as the greater outlook which they will open, in a business way, should hang heavily in the balance of the student who is asking himself the tremendously important question:

"Where shall I go to College?"-- Mitchell Gazette.