President Carter's Ideas

At the twenty-fourth annual dinner of the New England Association of Williams Alumni, President Carter of Williams College made a number of interesting remarks on the proposed shortening of the course at Harvard. He said that "in the great material expansion that has marked our country for a century, there has been a great increase in the number of college men going into business, certainly in the last year as many as 25 per cent." In the great increase in the number of students the proportion going into the learned professions has declined. "The superficial examinations which I have been able to make," said he, "go to confirm what, a priori, we should expect; that the-question of the length of the college course must be determined somewhat by considering the class whose culture will not be so well taken care of in their future pursuits as that of the lawyer and clergyman. If business is to absorb the energies of many of our graduates, four years of liberal training hardly seems too much, especially as in many cases those who go into business are from families already started in business enterprises, and are under no great pressure from either economy or age to begin their career."

Besides this many students have opportunities to manage college associations of some kind-athletic, dramatic, artistic or mimetic. Some of these associations have a large bank account and require large book-keeping and, at any rate, furnish considerable training in business.

"As for the increase of the age at which men enter professions, a careful computation shows that in our graduating classes for the last fifteen years there has been no increase in age; and in two classes taken at random-one graduated fifty five years ago and one about twenty-five years ago-the age of the former averaged nearly two years more than that of the latter; which was an exceptionally young class. I may say that the graduating age of the class fifty-five years ago exceeded the average graduating age of the last fifteen classes.