The Watchman And Southron

TOO MANY COLLEGIANS

Everybody seems to think that too many young people are going to college. Perhaps some of the young collegians think too many others are going. Perhaps here and there a boy who hates college, but is forced by ambitious parents to stay within academic walls, is to be found. But for every one of him there are a hundred or more boys outside who wish their parents had means or ambition to send them.

The objection is not to education: it is to the fact that with the crowds clamoring for college education, the institutions are so swamped that many of them cannot give an adequate education to the boys and girls who are trying to get it.

Most thoughtful people agree that the "junior college" is not the right solution. It disposes, for two years, of numbers of eager students. Perhaps it gives them something worth while. But it is not sufficiently different from the high school to give them the scholarly point of view, the keen inquiry into life, which are supposed to be among the fruits of the university.

Yale University is one of those which have tried to solve their own problems by limiting the number of students. It is having the usual difficulty in deciding which applicants will benefit most and give most to their communities in return for their four years of collegiate training.

President Angell says Yale's "competitive selection" of applicants has had gratifying results. It has "exercised a tonic effect on the entire situation."

"The entering classes have exhibited better preparation than formerly. they have done better work in college, the number of outstanding scholars has increased, and the mortality from academic deficiency has declined."

Whether a few thousand students more or less are in colleges who would better be elsewhere is of relatively minor importance for society as a whole. What is of crucial consequence is that the education which the colleges are offering to those young people shall be thoroughly sound and fruitful, and that if it be not so, feasible methods be discovered for introducing into it elements of more unequivocal worth.