94 SCIENTIST 



no good schools in the areas with much poorer overall 

 records. What it does mean is that the burden of responsi- 

 bility placed on the ambitious young American student for 

 planning his own education is much heavier than most stu- 

 dents realize. If he lives in a part of the country or in a 

 neighborhood in a big city in which he is the only student 

 in 10,000 who has the motivation of becoming a scientist 

 or scholar, the chances are that there will be few people 

 around to help him. His parents and neighbors are Ukely 

 to have their sights set on other objectives. The guidance 

 counselors he sees in school may be preoccupied with the 

 problems of slow learners or at best with good students 

 whose major motivation hes in nonintellectual directions. 

 More often than not such counselors will fail to recognize 

 the occasional future scholar and to direct him through an 

 appropriate high school curriculum to a proper college or 

 university. 



Colleges and universities vary almost as much from one 

 another as do high schools. As Dr. Bernard Berelson has 

 shown in his important study, Graduate Education in the 

 United States, there are 175 universities qualified to give 

 one or more Ph.D. degrees. Of these, only 22 give 54 per- 

 cent of the advanced degrees actually given. These are in 

 fact approximately the same 22 which informed scholars 

 would list as the best universities in the country. 



Some years ago Knapp and Greenbaum ^ made an ex- 

 haustive study of undergraduate colleges on the basis of the 

 proportion of Ph.D.'s to be found among their alumni. The 

 proportion varied from less than one Ph.D. per 1,000 grad- 

 uates to 19 Ph.D.'s per 1,000 graduates for the highest on 

 the list. A more recent analysis by Astin ^ shows that most, 

 if not all, of this difference can be attributed to the inten- 

 tions and capacities of the students who enter the colleges. 

 In other words, there is not much evidence that a certain 



