COLLEGE AND BUSINESS.

There are certain business men who pride themselves on the entirely original remark that they do not wish to employ college graduates in their offices when it is possible to obtain young men whose education has been of a rigidly practical nature, without the frills which are acquired during four years residence in a university. From this attitude the question has arisen as to the real value of a college degree to a young man seeking purely business employment.

In the professions the necessity of a university education is obvious, and accordingly the law and medical schools of the country offer a practical training to fit the student for his future work. In like manner our engineers and architects receive direct technical and practical knowledge from college courses which apply directly to the profession which the student is later to follow. But what does Harvard offer of a directly practical nature to the man who will spend the greater part of his life in purely mercantile business?

Every year Harvard graduates a body of men who at once go into some office or begin on the lowest rung of the ladder. Some of these men during their residence in Cambridge may have received only an impractical smattering of French or German, a hazy familiarity with the habits and private life of the Ancient Romans, and perhaps a more or less thorough understanding of the Indian tribes of the southwest and the varieties of the daisy in Middlesex county. Few men confine themselves to these subjects, but even such information, however trivial it may seem at first thought, gives a broad education to the student and fits him for intelligently taking up and mastering whatever problems his business may develop.

This side of a college education, however, does not appeal to business men. To their objections we urge the obviously practical side of a college training. We have in the undergraduate world an end less variety of positions and offices which can be won and used to advantage. Our College papers offer unrealized possibilities for obtaining experience, not only to the man who expects later to enter a journalistic or literary career, but also to the man who expects later to enter a journalistic or literary career, but also to the man who wishes to gain some insight into business methods. The managerships of teams and offices in the multitude of varied undergraduate organizations, could be made to render highly serviceable training. It is therefore possible to find more than congenial evenings and an engraved shingle or a dandy hatband in our College activities. Leaving side the obligation a man assumes in accepting an office, he owes to himself the duty of obtaining whatever business training he can absorb from his office and by so doing proves the oft repeated saying that the knowledge we receive in college from our books is but a small factor in the general education that college offers to the man who is ready to profit by every opportunity.