THE PRESS

In what purports to be "the first statistical proof of how the nation as a whole values a college education," Fortune's February Survey of Public Opinion reveals that almost half of the nation's families believe that a college man has the best chance for "success."

"Investment-value" alone is the basis of the poll. The values and purposes of higher learning are reduced to terms of the dollar. America's families, it seems, consider the four years of undergraduate life to be a capital investment whose worth can be evaluated in terms of financial return alone. The universities of the nation are great processing factories, the success of their efforts being measured in terms of the economic potentiality of the finished product.

If these are the standards, the institutions of higher learning throughout the nation have erred considerably, and might better drop the intangibles of education and concentrate on the practices of a trade or business school.

We can hardly agree with Fortune that such a poll gives America's answer to the arresting question of "What Price College?"... However important it may be, the economic factor does not exclude the consideration of cultural and non-material factors... If any conclusion can be drawn from the statistics as a whole it is that they prove nothing as to the success or failure of the American educational system. -Yale News