SELF EDUCATED VS. COLLEGE MEN.

EDITORS DAILY CRIMSON: - What fallacy so superficial is so generally received as the one most commonly advanced against a college education? It is urged that a young man's chances of success will not be enhanced by a course at college because a large majority of the "round table," and Cleveland, Bayard, Sherman, Carlisle and a host of other celebrities are "self-made men." Suppose that there are in the United States 10,000,000 men above the average age of a graduate, and that 100,000 of them are college alumni. Now applying the common test to Congress, it is necessary to prove not that this and that prominent member, that a great many members or even an overwhelming majority - but that more than ninety-nine per cent. are not college graduates. And for valid statistics against a graduate's comparative chances for Presidency, it would be necessary for our government to be more than four times as old as it is without having a single President who graduated from a college. Judging not from universal statistics, but from the fragmentary data so exultantly paraded by the opponents of higher education, it is safe to say that a college course increases one's probabilities of distinction more than seventy-five per cent. The contrary opinion arises from a popular inference that half of all men are college men and disregard of the paradox that all uneducated men are self educated.

N. A.