THE GOLDEN END

A suspicion of the fallibility of the statistics that are so often used to demonstrate the greatly superior earning power of college men has started an investigation of these figures at Columbia. In the new division of Economics of Education, graduate students are delving for the human equation beneath the never questioned fact that each year of formal education equals a step in a geometric progression of salary increases. The leader of the research, Dr. Clark, says confidently "We believe that we are on the road to finding a startling reversal of facts that will affect the whole economic foundation of education in this country."

It is found that the over-supply of professionally trained men has decreased their average income; that men who make fruitful use of technical education could accomplish fields as much in non-professional fields with desirable dispersion of brilliance. The present fallacious reasoning, according to Dr. Clark, attributes to education a pecuniary success which in reality is identical in source with the conquest of the education itself.

The investigation at Columbia then will not center upon a comparison of the wages earned by the educated and the non-educated, but upon the effect of education upon the wage earning capacities of those of equal ability. The result, even though drawn from such uncertain sources, may fulfill the warmest hopes of the investigators in its reversal of accepted facts. But it can interest educators only in so far as it takes from them one more weapon in their futile battle with the business men who question the worth of college education. Although those worn figures can have no vital part in the individual's appraisement of his own culture, the educated must regret the passing of the only mutually understand dable data with which they could confront such rabid materialists as Roger Herbs.