Education: Tragic Waste

For good or ill one of every 100 U. S. citizens is in college or university this fall. Never before in any nation on earth have so many (1,250,000) students and pseudo-students tried to climb the peaks of education. Big, bustling University of Minnesota in Minneapolis is sharing in the boom. Last week the small, silver-haired dean of its College of Science, Literature & the Arts, John Black Johnston, 68, prepared to retire, and as he did so lugubriously doomed one in every two of its students to drown in the sea of education

For 14 years Dean Johnston—a neurologist, among whose contributions to learning is a study of the nervous system of vertebrates—has been trying to find out why college students flunk. Six years ago he started to follow the academic fortunes of every freshman who entered Minnesota. Last week in a learned treatise Scholarship and Democracy* he reported that more than one half (52%) of 1,438 who matriculated in 1931 never became successful students. Of the children of the poor, 15% won honor standing, 58% did satisfactory work; of the well-to-do, only 6.5% achieved honors, 42% passed. But only one of 1,600 laborers in the State sends a child to the university, whereas one of 21 financiers is represented.

Dean Johnston’s suggestions for ending this educational prodigality: Let high schools divide their labor, some preparing students for college, others for work and citizenship. Let the last two years of high school be combined with the first two of college and award B.A.s at that point. Let only select students go on to real university scholarship. Let Minnesota establish a sliding scale of fees: no charge for honors students; $80 a year for those who pass; $200 for the slow, $400 for determined dullards.

Then the emancipated dean departed for a trip around the world, washed his hands of the “tragic waste” of U. S. higher education.

*Appleton-Century ($1.25).