satisfied to have his son ignore it also. "My son's college life," said he to the dean, "has been just what I wanted it to be; of course," he conceded as an afterthought, "I wish that he had won his promotion." One case of that kind may not be conclusive, but some who know the college world are convinced that the instance is typical—that the conception of college life which subordinates study to athletics or to social success (or else ignores it altogether) is limited to no single group of individuals and to no one institution, that it seems to be the honest ambition of an appalling proportion of fathers and mothers who are sending their sons to fashionable colleges, in the same spirit that accompanies their daughters to fashionable finishing schools.
After hearing the testimony of parents, our investigator may do well to learn also how some alumni feel about college work. Let him listen, for instance, to an intelligent young physician.who received the bachelor's degree from Princeton seventeen years ago, and who puts his ideal of a college career in somewhat this fashion: "Don't talk to me about making students work harder; work in itself is not only useless, it is degrading. There is but one thing of value to be got from college courses, and that is the ability to cram hastily into one's head a few essential facts, which comes from the passing of examinations. No man ought to be compelled to work hard and steadily at anything that does not Intel est him. You remember X; he was a grind in college and graduated near the head of the class but missed a lot of fun; Y, on the other hand, finished about as near the bottom of the class, but had a royal good time. Did it do the grind any good to work so hard? Both men are in medicine; is the loafer any the worse for his loafing?" We do not stop now to question data nor to analyze fallacies;[1] we merely note in passing that this feeling appears to be shared—though, perhaps,
- ↑ "Only one man in twelve years whose college record fell below C has contrived to change his habits sufficiently to graduate with honor from the [Harvard] Law School. . . . The same general truth holds for students in the Medical School. . . . These facts are quite at variance with popular opinion. Returns from several hundred Harvard undergraduates express the prevailing idea that success in college scholarship furnishes little or no indication of those intellectual qualities that men desire to possess. 'College life' is said to be the thing. The notion has spread that 'sports' in college settle down in the professional schools and surpass the men who in college were 'grinds.' Pity is often expressed for the unfortunate salutatorians and valedictorians who are supposed to be doomed to failure in life. Such notions must now go the way of many others, though some men will still comfort their mediocre college work by exalting opinions above facts. There are still people who believe that the earth is flat." W. T. Foster, op. cit., pp. 230-232. See further President A. Lawrence Lowell's analysis of some interesting evidence along this line in The Educational Review of October, 1911 ("College Studies and Professional Training"). Possibly these facts will come as news to a good many of us who used to share the Harvard undergraduate's illusion in regard to the capabilities of "sports" and "grinds."
