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ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION

to high pay, but that it does open wide for him the door of opportunity. The American ideal has been lower and too much the result of listening too closely to criticism. In fact, the principal faults in the American schools are due to the endeavor of the teachers to give the students what a century of training has shown to be about right, and, at the same time, try to satisfy the selfishness of men who want well-trained, narrow specialists without bearing any of the expense of training them.

When specialties are discussed it is well to remember that it is diffcult to train a man thoroughly in a minor subject without causing him to lose the sense of proportion he must maintain, if he is ever to be more than a part of a machine. Whether all the boys are fit to be engineers or not, they represent a select lot of humanity when they finally finish the grind and get their diplomas. A large percentage of them should amount to something later in life. That more do not meet with considerable success is due to the wilful blindness of the deans, who act as employment agents for large corporations, in their anxiety to advertise to the world that "this school, owing to its excellent methods of instruction, cannot supply the demand for graduates." It requires the use of the short, ugly word to properly characterize these statements in many cases.

Many large corporations like to fill their offices