68 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



UNIVERSITY STANDARDS AND STUDENT ACTIVITIES 



By ORRIN LESLIE ELLIOTT 



REGISTRAR, STANFORD UNIVERSITY 



IN a recent address before the Stanford Forum Professor Barrows 

 made reference to the current criticism and depreciation of the 

 American college. This criticism may be summed up in the statement 

 that the college does not make good. Its output is woefully disappoint- 

 ing. Its business is to prepare young men and women for effective liv- 

 ing in their time and place, to equip them for the responsibilities and 

 duties which every generation in turn must meet and discharge if the 

 standards of civilization are to be maintained and pushed forward. The 

 charge is that college graduates do not meet the test; they do not meas- 

 ure up to the requirements; they are deficient in those very qualities 

 which the higher education is supposed especially to nurture. 



Professor Barrows would frankly accept the situation : the fact is 

 mainly true; the explanation is that too much has been expected of the 

 college. College students are too immature. As one goes about the 

 campus i J is groups of boys and girls that he meets, full of the play- 

 time spirit, not taking learning seriously, their minds filled with games 

 and social functions. Better recognize that it is so, consider the college 

 period as an extension of the playground, and not expect of it equip- 

 ment for the serious part of life. 



Professor Barrows was holding a brief for the graduate school, 

 whose function should be, as he conceived it, to do exactly what it is 

 unreasonable to expect of the undergraduate college. That point I do 

 not wish to follow. But that which Professor Barrows passed off care- 

 lessly as an added argument for the graduate school may well be the 

 object of further inquiry. If it is true that the college has failed there 

 is something pathetic in the situation thus presented; because educa- 

 tion is the one thing to which democracy has pinned its faith. And the 

 outward progress of education has been all and more than its wildest 

 enthusiasts could have dreamed. From kindergarten to university the 

 wealth of the state has been poured out, and the state's bounty supple- 

 mented by unparalleled private munificence, until the highest education 

 is within reach of the humblest youth in the land. Within a single 

 generation, while population has increased but a hundred per cent., 

 the attendance upon institutions of higher education has increased four 

 hundred per cent. The expansion in secondary education has been no 

 less significant. In 1880 there were no four-year high schools in the 



