AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION

Under the rather undignified title "Should Johnny Go to College", Mr. Christian Gauss, Dean of the College, Princeton University, writes entertainingly in the current Scribners Magazine on the question of who should go to college and why. But his remarks on the subject are more than unusual in not being at all like the customary weighty words and sentiments of distinguished educators, in that they are both keenly perceptive and intelligible as well. The subject is ripe for treatment, in fact, has been treated extensiveley before, but never more humanly.

In all the hurly-burly over the post war rush of American youth to the educational institutions of the country, a great deal has been said about limiting enrollment, selective admission regulations, and other machinery which would enable the universities and colleges to protect themselves from the thundering herd. Dean Gauss points out that much of this responsibility of selection might well be delegated to the parents of the potential applicant. He then goes on to show by means of very pertinent and quite informal examples of individual cases, the misfortune of social maladjustment in college resulting from the attitude of parents who either can not or will not recognize the bare truth--that Johnny's temperament is not adaptable to the life of a higher educational institution.

A highly ingenious and certainly a new thought on the subject may be credited fully to Dean Gauss. After estimating the average cost of a college education at something over eight thousand dollars, he suggests that parents try the experiment of investing this sum for their child at birth at compound interest rates. What such a sum would have grown to by the time the child reaches the college board period of life is not mathematically estimated, though one must suppose it to be staggering. The moral is, however, how many parents who now send their sons to college with the hope of giving them the opportunity to increase their earning power in later, life would not under such circumstances send them out into the world with their little nest egg, especially if they knew them to be neither attracted by college nor suited to its life? It would be an interesting experiment, its only draw back being that only a small percentage of parents are in possession of the eight thousand at the proper time, --the birth of the young subject. Dean Gauss is to be congratulated, however, on bringing up and advancing valuable suggestions on the other side of the problem, --not how to keep out men ill-suited for college or how to wood out cases of mal-adjustment once in, but means by which those most intimately in touch with the individual can make the decision for him.