100 SCIENTIST 



high school graduates ever earn college degrees.* Much 

 of the responsibility for this wastage must rest with society 

 for failing to make the needs and opportunities more widely 

 known, and to help young people get a clear picture of 

 their own talents and potentiahties. In the final analysis, 

 however, the responsibility is an individual one. There are 

 definite Umits to how much governments can entice or 

 parents can push an individual student into an intellectual 

 career. The student must take the major initiative himself. 

 The responsibihty bears heaviest, as we have seen, on 

 the talented youngster who finds himself in a segment of 

 society that habitually knows little or cares less about high 

 intellectual achievement. What can such an individual do? 

 In the first place, he can discreetly try to evaluate the 

 high school he is going to. It is worth knowing in this 

 connection that large high schools send a much higher 

 proportion of their graduates on to a Ph.D. degree than 

 smaller ones do, especially in the sciences. High schools 

 graduating from one to 20 students per year produce 

 future Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences at a rate of only 

 0.69 per 1,000. From there the rate rises steadily until 

 it reaches 7.3 for schools with classes of over 800. But 

 size alone would be an uncertain criterion. There are 

 several other ways the student can judge the quality of 

 the schools available to him.^ For example, he can, with- 

 out too much difficulty, find out how many recent graduates 

 have been admitted to good colleges. The Knapp and 

 Greenbaum book will be helpful at this point and later on 

 in evaluating the intellectual level of the colleges con- 

 cerned. He can also determine whether a school is par- 

 ticipating in the widespread effort to improve secondary 

 education. Is it experimenting with one of the new mathe- 

 matics programs; has the PSSC physics course or one of 

 the new chemistry courses been introduced? Have some of 



