THE TOO LIBERAL COLLEGE

Last evening's Transcript states that, contrary to expectation, there is virtually no decrease in the enrollment of the principal New England colleges. At Harvard, men have come as before, and they have come prepared to spend as before. There has been only a minor decrease in the average standard of living. The storekeepers of Harvard Square are not facing the bleak winter of their colleagues in Boston. For example, one of the music stores reports that its sales of expensive phonograph records is nearly as great as ever, the radio notwithstanding. Men may buy more circumspectly, but still they buy.

All this is heartening in the face of the hard-times headlines in every newspaper. The problems of the strikers and the unemployed lose their poignancy when viewed from the vantage-point of Harkness easy-chairs, with heat at the turn of a radiator valve and plenty of food in the dining-room below. But the amenities of the House Plan make all the more evident the discrepancy between the sheltered college and the world outside. Many men, particularly those holding scholarships, will find swift disillusionment when they discover that their carning capacity in the first year after graduation is insufficient to maintain the inflated standard of living to which they have become accustomed.

The liberal-arts colleges, in teaching their sons how to live, teach them to live too well.