UNDERGRADUATE "REALISM"

In his statement concerning the accomplishment of the Alumni Placement Bureau during the past year, J. F. Dwinnell has added much fuel to the fire of those who maintain that colleges, by a process of protective coddling, unfit their students for effective participation in a calloused world. The head of the bureau suggests that the reason for the failure to place more men in the last two graduating classes is that those men either refused to believe that conditions beyond the cloister were as bad as had been represented, or had reason to expect that the family budget would somehow permit them to spend a peaceful year in the graduate schools. If one reads the correct meaning into the statistics, it has taken two years for college men to become conscious of the fact that the Depression was anything more than a blemish in newspaper headlines.

One finds it easier to place the blame for this undergraduate unconsciousness on the shoulders of educators and doting parents, rather than on the student himself. That unconsciousness is the product of a system, conceived withal for his benefit, which gives many a youth more pocket money than he can possibly spend, which often considers his whims of more importance than those of his family in readjusting the budget, which feeds and clothes and amuses him with luxury,--which, in short, places him in a class entirely removed from the rest of the world.

Most observers will view the Dwinnell report with satisfaction and feel that at last youth has overcome the system, has been forced to take a realistic point of view. With considerable reservation, this interpretation may be correctly applied to the present generation of college men. But once the ominous cloud of unemployment has been removed, the system will reassert itself. It is difficult to propose an effective solution for a problem which has become an integral part of the nation's educational methods. But this much is certain: the lesson of the past two years is unanswerable in its condemnation of the coddling, however well intended, which shapes the attitude of college youth. No matter what involved apologia may be forthcoming from the educator and the parent, it is in them that lies the original fault. They must effect the solution.