PLUMBER'S PUDDING

When a college pauses to take stock of itself in a report drawn up solely for the benefit of its graduates, it might be fairly said that it is none of anybody else's business. But, such a report as this, just published by one of the most influential smaller colleges in the country, goes into a question seriously affecting college men everywhere. It points out one of the most striking tendencies in present day education--the tendency to "hurry up" the finished product, to specialize the college course, transforming the four years into a sort of undergraduate professional school, highly intensified in training. Of the men's colleges founded since 1870, seventy per cent emphasize "practical" professional training; while 133 of the 183 men's colleges in the country have professional courses for undergraduates. This does not include state colleges. Among the latter, state appropriations of $40,000,000 in 1918 included only half a million to cultural colleges, so-called, and a federal appropriation the same year for "higher education" went entirely to the professional school type of college.

What is the future of the strictly cultural college. That there is room for more than one type is evident, when state universities like California register an enrollment of 43,000 students, almost as many as the entire body of living Harvard alumni. We have reached a condition where our colleges are literally being drowned. Figures point to the overwhelming trend of the present in favor of the "practical, professional" type of college; but the arguments in favor of a general cultural course are by no means to be ignored. "Culture" does not mean blind, narrow-minded reading of the Classics any more than it implies an implicit faith in the efficacy of the Quadrivium of the old monastery school. A cultural course means broad general training--"literature, science, history, and the knowledge of men", as opposed to absolute concentration in one intensive field. The danger in a single-track education can be well summed up in the words of a successful flood-engineer of the Middle West:--"I trained myself to go out and clean up my field, to make a million and then quit. I've got that now, but what am I going to do with it? I have absolutely nothing to fall back upon!"

The exaggerated culture of sixty years ago, the idea that no "gentleman" was "finished" or could call himself educated until he had absorbed "atmosphere" in Germany, England, or Japan has defeated itself. Possibly its successor as "the thing to do" will be supplementary education as a garage mechanic in Kansas. At any rate, what intensive education lacks and what ostensive has, is the ability to train a man's capacity for growth instead of his fitness for any one job. He may not a single specific item of his four year undergraduate course, but twenty years afterward he will have a background impossible of attainment in any other way.