RAISING THE ANTE

A step in the direction which it now appears every endowed educational institution must ultimately take, has been announced by Yale University in the form of an undergraduate tuition increase. Effective next fall the fee will be four hundred dollars a year, an increase of fifty dollars. A significant item in the bare notice of this step as reported in the press, is the fact that "additional appropriations will be made to prevent the increase from adding to the financial burdens of the self-supporting students."

The whole problem of college tuition and whether or not the student should pay the full cost of education, recalls the prophecy made last spring by John D. Rockefeller Jr., that the day of the large donor was coming to a close, and that universities must eventually become self-supporting. At Yale, even with the forthcoming increase, students will still pay less than half the cost of education. At Harvard the percentage paid by the individual must be even smaller. Though the total endowment is much larger than at Yale, the drain of graduate schools and work is greater here.

With a uniform increase in, tuition the shoe is bound to pinch somewhere. For the approximate two-thirds or more students who are not self-supporting there will be no great hardship. It would be safe to say that for at least half of this number the regular opportunity to pay the entire bill would be welcome. They should not, and in most cases, do not care to accept philanthropy in the case of education. Since it seems impossible to develop any system which would operate efficiently in the form of a sliding scale arranged on the ability to pay, the only alternatives appear to be a gradual tuition increase or a continuation of the begging policy for American education exclusive of state institutions. The solution for the self-supporting student is in a highly developed loan fund system and increasing service and efficiency in personnel and employment bureaus. A college education is supposed to endow the average man with an adequate earning capacity which would enable him to repay a long term loan at a reasonable rate of interest. The injustice under such a system would be negligible and would enable the universities to be in a degree, at least, self-supporting them selves.