ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 255 



years. Seventeen are on salaries within their proper professional field. 

 The average length of time that they have been out of college is about 

 two and one-half years and thei r average compensation will be this year 

 one thousand dollars. The illustrations given are from a single insti- 

 tution and the particular examples are used because the information is 

 at hand. 



The United States Department of Agriculture at Washington is also 

 a good illustration of opportunities open to graduates of agricultural 

 colleges, both in the way of positions and further training — the latter 

 quite as important as the former. Within the present fiscal year twenty- 

 two college graduates have been appointed in a single division of this 

 department at salaries ranging from $480 to $1200. 



As indicative of the rapidity of promotion, it is stated that ten recent 

 graduates who entered the department last year and this year at $480 

 per annum are soon, to be advanced to $1000, while within the year an 

 equal number of similar promotions will follow. Another division, it 

 is authoritively stated, will need the coming year fifteen to twenty 

 young men, preferably graduates of agricultural colleges. The Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture at Washington is rapidly becoming a great post- 

 graduate school of agriculture with scholarships and opportunities for 

 rapid promotion. The department has just sent graduates of agricul- 

 tural colleges thus trained to Hawaii and Porto Rico to take charge of 

 experiment stations there at a. salary of $3000 each, one of whom, Frank 

 D. Gardner, was of the class of 1891 of the University of Illinois. 

 After all, however, past and even present opportunities are important 

 only as they indicate the future. The important question to a young 

 man choosing a career is not so much what is the present opportunity, but 

 what are the future prospects. Not how well will he begin his career, 

 but how well will he end it. The average expectancy of a man who has 

 reached the age of twenty-one is forty-one and one-half years. The 

 question in preparing for the work of life is not alone, therefore, what is 

 the opportunity today or what will it be four years hence when the young 

 man has completed a course in college, but what is it going to be during 

 the next forty years. 



