HIGH-GRADE MEN: IN COLLEGE AND OUT. 429 



HIGH-GKADE MEN": IN COLLEGE AND OUT. 



By Professor EDWIN G. DEXTER, 



UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS. 



HHHE American college graduate has often been called upon to face 

 -*- the accusation of impracticability. From time to time men of 

 wide influence and broad experience have censured not only his ideals, 

 but his fitness for participation in those affairs which count for most 

 in a modern civilization. The burden of their complaint is that he is 

 a dreamer of dreams, not a doer of deeds, and that there is little place 

 for him in the strenuous competition of the life of to-day. Such 

 accusations are gradually becoming less and less frequent. Enough has 

 been written upon the subject to prove the general falsity of the posi- 

 tion, and no further defense is needed of college men as a class. It can 

 not, however, be denied that as individuals college graduates meet, with 

 very different degrees of perfection, the demands of life. Some take 

 first rank in their chosen callings ; others see their efforts crowned only 

 with moderate success, while another, and we believe a smaller class, 

 make partial or total shipwreck of their hopes. But this differentiation 

 and stratification which is so noticeable in the struggle for honors in 

 the various competitions of business and professional life was equally 

 true for them during their undergraduate courses. In the student body 

 of every institution of learning we find the high-grade men, the moder- 

 ate successes, from the standpoint of college education, and the rear 

 guard. A question of no little importance, and one with which the 

 present paper deals is this: Is the high-grade man of his college days 

 high-grade still when put to the severer tests of active life ? Is the level 

 to which he rose or sank in competition for college honors his level for 

 life, or is there a general shifting of strata for the changed conditions ? 

 The answer to these questions is of broad educational significance. It 

 has to do with ideals : those of the college and of life. The high-grade 

 man in college has realized most nearly the ideal of his alma mater. 

 He is its best product according to its criterion of success and is given 

 its highest stamp of approval. If he fails in life, it means that judged 

 by another criterion that of society in its broadest sense he is not 

 a success ; that the two criteria are different, based upon different ideals, 

 and, as a corollary, since life is the final test, that the college ideal is not 

 a practical one and that the aim of higher academic education is false. 

 If, however, he holds first place in life, as he did in the preparation 

 for it, we must conclude that the two ideals, that of the college and 



