"MUCH LEARNING"

If one may judge by the number of offers from bond offices which the average senior receives in his morning's mail, the college education is not the utterly valueless thing it is commonly considered. There seems to be almost innumerable "houses" only too anxious for the addition of a few "bright young college men" to their staff of salesmen; even if those same bright young men have obtained a degree in Physics or English Literature by only the narrowest of margins.

The date of the publication of Hudibras or the strict interpretation of the categorical imperative are not likely to increase the sales of Mex Pete, or fire insurance policies. And the mythical average graduate probably has no more definite idea of such details than his stenographer, if he has one. As numerous others have remarked previously, college is not for learning facts but for learning how to think and how to judge values and make decisions. It is the pale ghost of that training which prompts the glowing epistles from "State Street" and the promising offers at the Employment Office.

But there are really three stages to modern education: elementary, wherein one learns permanently important details, like the sum of two and two; the training of the intellect, begun in the efforts to pass the college boards and continued in the similar effort to pass divisionals; and lastly, the second era of facts and theories of lasting importance--the professional schools.

The old cry was that a college man although starting four years behind his less schooled competitor would pass him easily when he did start. Now the weary senior who starts out immediately on his career is in the position he once could despise. He is the unschooled one to be passed anon by his former classmates, no matter what his forte may be.

The extension only exemplifies the proverbial boundlessness of knowledge; and without doubt, practicality, the safety valve of today, will prevent the awful possibility of an infinite progression of such founts of learning. Mean-while graduate schools grow in importance and every year larger numbers graduate and become not "freshmen among alumni", but 1L. or 1G.B.A.