HANDS OFF

A college education is not a financial advantage, but a positive detriment according to Dr. Harold F. Clark, Professor of Education at Teachers College. Mr. Clark's two points to prove higher education financially unprofitable are not so revolutionary as his proposed cure. There is, to be sure, some significance in his statement that more men are being trained for certain professions than can be absorbed by them without a consequent lowering of the standards of remuneration. Recognition of this condition is necessary to prevent serious loss, but Mr. Clark's bureaucratic demands for state control of the number of professional students are too manifestly contrary to the American spirit of educational freedom for any real consideration.

Even more prone than Mr. Clark to rate the value of college training on a dollar and cents basis, state authorities are sure to administer even the most carefully constructed statutes in a mode dangerous to liberal tradition. To regulate the opportunity for the study of the arts and sciences by financial consideration is to forget completely the cultural motive behind these studies. Were Mr. Clark's state regulation to operate, learning for its own sake might easily be pushed aside, and universities become mere factories to feed professional ranks. One would prefer to find the remedy for the conditions which Mr. Clark discovers in a gradual adjustment of the supply of college men to the natural demands of the various vocational fields. And until more evidence for the opposition is adduced, it is not likely that the present reliance on a rugged individualism in University affairs will be lightly pushed aside.