DARTMOUTH REFORMS

Dartmouth College, having experimented for twelve years with the selective process of admissions, has now decided to extend, it as the sole basis for choosing applicants. Prospective freshmen will be considered on individual standards, entrance unit requirements are to be abolished, and the approved school will become a vestigial organ in Hanover. The decision comes as the result of a feeling that the present qualifications are both impersonal and meaningless, and is intended to exert a humanizing influence upon the somewhat Prussian character of admission brochures.

It may fairly be assumed that Dartmouth, which inaugurated the selective system and has admitted a number of applicants beneath its aegis, is satisfied with the results insofar as they are measurable. But the inference, immediately drawn in many quarters, that such a system would mark a salutary step forward in other liberal arts colleges, is not very soundly based. For among the chief implications of personalized admission is an increased flexibility in standards. If this purpose were not in the background, admission rules and a selective system need not be mutually exclusive, for inflexible standards might be applied and a personal evaluation made of the survivors. As the sole system in use, selective admission must lower standards, and the decline must be reflected in the secondary schools whose graduation requirements are already painfully lax. The present college courses which provide a wearying knowledge of elementary dates, elementary syntax, and even more elementary English composition are the result of that laxity, and would have to be even more extensively invoked.

Without distinction between honor and pass degrees, colleges must rest on a single standard for fitness, and it is the excellence of each college which determines the rigidity of that graduating standard. To maintain it many men are deprived of the pleasure of working at a college level during their freshman year, to achieve the first steps of Parnassus which their preparatory schools ignored. Present educational conferences regularly allot one day to discussing the problem, and their conclusions are never sanguine. Any lowering of the barriers to admit men, however attractive and promising personally, who must be laboriously assisted through their freshman courses, could not be considered an educational reform.