PROFESSOR PALMER OVERLOOKS

From the pen of Professor Emeritus George Palmer comes an indictment of the Junior College movement challenging not only for its close reasoning but also because of the ripe wisdom of its author.

Professor Palmer bases his case upon the assumption that the four year college course which "aims at teaching nothing useful, and so by its presence in a society disposed to measure everything by material standards becomes a factor of extremest use" is the most vital and worthwhile element in American higher education. To him the growth of the Junior College will cause the college to drop its first two years, add two more at the upper end and gradually but inevitably transform itself into a professional school. He sees this process already going on at Johns Hopkins and at Stanford. He is alarmed for the passing from American life of what he aptly calls "our scholarly amateur". Unless the Junior College idea is checked the average college graduate in the future will "go directly from school to business, and the glorious peculiarity of American education will disappear."

With most of this one can agree fully but Professor Palmer leaves out of consideration one important point, the relationship of the over-population of the arts college with the Junior College. By calling attention to the abuses to which the Junior College idea is subject Professor Palmer has performed a highly valuable service. He has clarified the whole issue so far as the movement represented by Leland Stanford and Johns Hopkins is concerned. He has overlooked its high usefulness as a weapon for the protection of the arts college and the "scholarly amateur" from a mass of applicants who are not yet fitted for higher "cultural" education and who, by their very presence inevitably lower standards and contribute to that mass production which every enlightened educational leader is trying to get away from today.

In order to pacify at once the professional legislator and the professional alumnus, and the opinion for wide open doors to all satisfying minimum requirements in state or endowed institutions, which they represent, some such institution as the Junior College is necessary. Giving a two-year course and an A. A. degree it should be a unit in itself and not merely a step toward a professionalized college. Into it would flow that lower third in private colleges and that lower half in state colleges who usually drop out after the first two years anyway under the present system and who are adapted to further general education beyond high school but who are not as assailable in the four year arts college.

This this group is no figment of the imagination the figures of every higher educational institution in the country will testify. It represents a phase in the development of American nationality peculiar to the present era. It demands college wholesale without knowing what college means and without being able to reap the rewards of college. The phase is temporary but it is real. In order to carry the college through it without serious harm to the curriculum, ideals, and standards and at the same time to satisfy and faster the development of the intermediate group referred to above the Junior College is both useful and necessary. The four year arts college and the Junior College can exist side by side each meeting the educational demands of contemporary American in its own way.