SHOWING THE WAY

While the American colleges have been racking their brains over the problem of overcrowding, the School, of Business Administration has quietly come forward with a possible solution. There is a general agreement that limitation of enrollment is a pressing necessity--Dartmouth and Princeton already have come to it. But the question has been one of method. Each of the latter colleges has adopted a process that involves various sorts of selection, all of a more or less problematical nature. Significant in all the plans is the acknowledgment that the ordinary entrance examination is not sufficient.

Last year, when psychological tests were blossoming on every hand, most of us were inclined to scoff, Columbia adopted them for entering students, and other colleges also were reported to look on them with favor. But still we were sceptical. Then Mr. Edison's questionnarie and a hundred other such rigamaroles seemed to reduce the whole matter to an absurdity.

But Dean Donham's report, published today, shows that carefully planned intelligence tests are not to be scorned. The fact that they have proved remarkably accurate gauges of the mental ability of Business School students, suggests that they might prove of equal value in testing fitness for entrance to College. The great complaint against ordinary scholastic examinations has been that they do not test a man's capacity for learning, but only the amount of learning he may have already stored up. Clearly, the results of a psychological test, if applied with discretion, are a closer estimate of intrinsic mental power, which, after all should be the basis of selection. In this way such a test, as a supplement to regular examinations, would have a double merit. In the first place, it will spare a man who is incapable of profiting by college work, from the waste of his time and money in entering. Secondly, and most important from the college's view-point, it will offer a fair and rational means of elimination as a step toward limited enrollment.