Heart-Searching

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There will be found few to deny that we have lately rounded a turning point in American academic history. For the first time more young people are seeking higher education than the institutions devoted to it can accommodate. For that reason colleges are in a position to pick and choose their students; and all over the country they are doing it. In the parlance of trade, the colleges are in a buyers' market. As Mr. Lowell, of Harvard, puts it: "The idea that going to college is one of the inherent rights of man seems to have obtained a baseless foothold in the minds of many people. To select the fit and devote our energies to them is our duty to the public for whose service we exist."

Harvard will have plenty of company in the pursuit of this policy. Many, perhaps most, of the attempts to define the aims of the American College are in substantial agreement. President Hopkins, of Dartmouth, says its function is that of giving "a perspective on the conditions of life." President Park, of Bryn Mawr, declared to her students: "That the college gives to its best ability an education preparatory to living in its justification, and perhaps its only justification." Again quoting Mr. Lowell: "The object of cultural education is to broaden and deepen the range of thought; that of vocational to prepare for a particular use. The primary aim of the former is building the brain; that of the latter, storing it. These objects are not inconsistent, and both kinds of education produce both results, albeit to a different extent."

* * * * --Saturday Evening Post.