HARD KNOCKS VS. HISTORY

Popular magazines have of late contained a great deal of ballyhooing as to the uselessness of the college degree. More than one successful business man, graduates of the "college of hard knocks" have come out in print to declaim against the college graduate's overweening sense of his own abilities, extravagant habits, and inability to buckle down to work. An age which measures success in financial returns has come to regard four years at college as so much time wasted.

It is a distinct relief to hear that the Committee on Character and Fitness of Applicants for Admission to the New York Bar has decided that a college degree should be required of all applicants. Almost all of the college graduates applying for admission to the legal profession have been found to be "well fitted both in character and education." Perhaps seventy-five per cent of those with only secondary school education were considered "seriously deficient in general education and general background." The motive for choice of the law by the latter was generally hope of increased salary. Few of them had any coherent notion of American or English history. One applicant was of the opinion that Magna Carta was a naval expedition.

Few would deny that an adequate education can be acquired outside a classroom. But it is only the very exceptional student who has the initiative or the vision to be able to do so. Mere hard work and a desire to succeed do not uniformly bring results. Leaving the delights of scholarship out of the question, it is a soul-satisfying thing to be able to tell the butter and egg men that a group of successful and hardheaded lawyers have found that a college education is off practical value.