THE COLLEGE TRADE SCHOOL

If one were attempting to classify all education in very general terms, one might well divide it into the three heads, education for the professions, for vocations, and for avocations. Of these the university training once included only the first and the last, the thought of vocational training in college having been abhorrent to the cultured mind. But within a decade or two there has come a distinct change. "During the past few years," says the latest Saturday Evening Post, "the colleges have been swelling their catalogues by the addition of so many new groups of vocational studies that a caustic Frenchman who has lately been studying our educational system was led to observe that 'In America you have schools for everything except learning.'"

"This witty generalization," the weekly observes, "is obviously unfair and misleading, but it indicates how learned Europeans regard our current passion for attempting to teach in our colleges subjects that are far better learned in the school of experience." While students for the ministry, medicine, law, and the teaching profession have long found preparation at college, the modern university -- the state university in particular -- has added to its other activities a score of quasi-technical fields unthought of a century ago. The sciences, business, engineering, and agriculture, to cite a few examples, have now been accorded a place in academic life; the industries are drawing upon the university for laboratory-research men, for construction experts, and business managers. More and more emphasis is being placed upon work which can be reckoned as so much bread and butter in the future.

It is clear that if the university is to help, the world as well as the individuals under its immediate influence it must strive after something more than more culture. But is this true of the college proper? Harvard men sometimes account it a hardship to be forced to accept an S.B. rather than an A.B. simply because they entered college without Latin. When generations of graduates have found that college training made life sufficiently more interesting as to warrant their sending their sons back to the old institutions, is it surprising that alumni become anxious lest the modern college become a genteel trade school? But there need be no cause for alarm; at the end of his college career the average student will agree that the graduate schools should be increased to infinitum if need be, but that the college itself must be guarded from the commercialization of culture.