The June Armies

The recurrent armies of college graduates discharged each June upon a cold and unfeeling world have long presented an arresting spectacle. Nowadays they number annually something like 200,000 young men and women, each of whom has spent three or four years upon an educational process costly alike to himself, his parents and the community and each of whom labors up far the not unreasonable expectation of getting something worth while in return, Ten years ago it was a matter of some disquiet. Youth seemed to be attracted into the colleges less by the delights of pure learning than by the fact that the diploma appeared to be a golden passport to the amenities of the white-collar life and to social if not financial advancement. How was it possible to prevent their being disappointed? It was obvious that neither the History of Art nor Biology B offered a particularly sound training for the acquisition of "success," and dreadful stories about Ph.D.'s found driving streetcars in after life went the rounds, in a hopeless attempt to quench youth's unquenchable enthusiasm for doing the popular and conventional thing.

That was ten years ago. The colleges felt the criticism, produced a good deal of rather bad "rationalization" to justify their position, and drifted uneasily into the morasses of a vocational training which as often as not was quite useless to train anybody for a vocation. At the same time they turned in another direction, and the employment or "placement" bureau appeared in hundreds of institutions which felt themselves under an obligation not only to "educate" their students but to get them started in some sort of life that would satisfy them. The results -- and President William Mather Lewis of Lafayette has described some of them in a recent brochure -- were a little unexpected. That very enlargement and de-humanization of industry which seemed to make it so difficult for the undergraduate to break in tended to work on the side of the colleges. The great modern undertaking, with its thousands of employees and executives, can no longer rely upon personal "hiring"; a vast institution itself, it is forced to turn to an institutionalized source of supply for its recruits, and the college placement bureaus are ready to its hand. Perhaps it is less that college training really equips men for important roles in life as it is that the college offers at least a recognized system of some sort of training, is convenient and conventionally accepted, and works better than no system at all.

The problem of the graduating armles is not solved. The colleges are still somewhat confused in their efforts, and even the best academic "education" coupled with the most discerning and intelligent placement work may still fall short of giving the undergraduate any real concept of what the affair of living and making a living involves. But the colleges are undoubtedly trying hard, and if above the whole of their effort there hovers the shadow of institutionalization of conscious 'teaching" rather than of natural learning, it is no darker than the similar shadow above all our efforts at managing the life which we have succeeded so profoundly in complicating for ourselves--in the rare month of June as in other months. N. Y. Herald Tribune.