EDUCATIONAL AMERICA

The University of Chicago has just received a gift of $10,000,000 and is making additional plans for equipment and endowment which will require $15,000,000. Thus the name of the great Western University can be added to the roll of those institutions of learning which have safely passed through the financial crisis. Cultured foreigners, visiting us are puzzled at the American attitude toward education. Other countries have their universities but nowhere is there such an ever increasing demand for entrance to college. It is the vision of thousands of young men and women preparing for entrance examinations which has caught the sympathy of America. They want to go to college and no one who can possibly help them is able to turn down the appeal.

The great difference between us and other countries is to be found in the lower schools. In the Old World, University education is for the few. Entrance is carefully guided by class lines and children of the laboring and lower middle classes are systematically pointed in another direction. While they are still in their teens, the courses which they are permitted to take lead only to one place the employment office. Our national system of education leads directly to the College Entrance Examination Board. To be sure, young people are allowed to take school courses which do not prepare for higher study but they do so from their own choice. The result is an ever growing number demanding entrance to college.

The value of education is part of our American creed. Institutions run for profit have advertised it broadcast and experience has shown that the college man starts into the world with better assurance of success than the man who never went to college. And young young America is so much aware of this fact that--numerous as our universities and colleges are, and tremendous as is the sum of their enrollment--the demand is greater than the accommodation, and is, becoming one of our biggest national problems.

State universities in the West are offering free tuition to all who can maintain themselves at these institutions. There is little doubt that a strong demand for such an extension of university facilities will come in the East. Many more young people have set their minds upon going to college than the present privately-endowed institutions can contain.

It is probable that the demand will be met not by increasing the already established colleges and universities until they reach a useless and ungainly size, but by building and organizing more institutions under state supervision. At any rate the cry for more money for college endowment funds will be heard for a long time to come, and when the long-suffering public begins to tire and contributions fall off, the state will take charge and raise the money by taxes. The youth of America wants a college education and the American youth usually gets what he wants.