Artes Liberales

Robert M. Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, used last Sunday's New York Times to lash out at what he calls "the confusion, waste and uncertainty of American education." He advocated a plan to award the bachelor's degree at the end of Sophomore year at college, thereby ending the average student's general education at the age of 20 and allowing "the students who want to go farther, and are able to do so," to start working for their master's degree in their Junior year.

Whether or not the Hutchins plan should be adopted in its particulars is not too important; the point is that there is something radically wrong with the present structure of liberal education. There is a lag,--a dangerous gap--, between the training that our liberal arts colleges offer, and the demand for that training in the world of business and industry. There used to be a time, at the turn of the century, when a man with four years of cultural background was a rarity. In recent years it has been difficult to get a white-collar job without the degree, but almost as tough to get one with it.

The reasons for this lag between the liberal training and the social demand can be found in the historical development of American education. The great outcry for a popularization of this training that could open up a smooth road to advancement gave rise to thousands of new colleges at the ends of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. By 1930, these factories of liberal teaching were turning more than 1,100,000 men off the curricular assembly lines, and 1,000,000 more from the mushroomed vocational training programs combined with them to glut the job market. With more college men and fewer jobs, the liberal arts enrollment that had jumped 468 per cent since 1900 had come to a virtual stand-still by 1940. The war will continue to absorb college materials. And the middle class, which has always supplied the greatest proportion of students, will be less able to support a long, expensive education after the war--especially when that education is no longer a sure-fire job-getter.

With people having less money to spend on a liberal arts degree that means less in terms of cold cash, many of the educators who now scoff at Hutchins are going to see his general revisions going into effect in spite of their blusterings. Colleges will have to give a quicker, less expensive training to the great majority of men who do not want to go to graduate school, but merely want a sound general education before trying their hand at business. And they will have to stiffen the requirements for a full degree, collaborating on programs with the graduate schools, for those who intend to make their scholarly pursuits part of a life career.