In Chicago

President Max Mason of Chicago University was host last week to an Institute for Administrative Officers of Institutions of Higher Learning. Discussions centred on his proposition that colleges will get nowhere while they work on "the assumption that the majority of students come to our colleges to resist education." Whether that assumption arises from or determines the undergraduate attitude, the fact remains that there is a game of student v. instructor, learning v. credits. This game would stop and the players either go home or work seriously, thinks President Mason, if comprehensive examinations were substituted for the present credit system wherein each course passed, each "credit" won, is an integer in the formula of "Success." President Mason went so far as to hint that the University of Chicago might be among the first to "demonstrate the courage to calmly abolish the entire system of credit bookkeeping."* If colleges are going to be less mechanical about how they teach, they will need to be more scrupulous about whom they teach. President Arthur E. Morgan of Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio) and President Frank L. McVey of the University of Kentucky both harped on the increasing necessity for stricter, more selective admissions policies. To this phase of the subject the Chicago Tribune made a characteristic contribution: ". . . It may be that the education processes will have to catch the student at a much younger age to give him the whole works. .. . ."

Research Report

During the week, School and Society (weekly) published parts of a research report from the University of Michigan, which contained suggestive findings for college-entrance authorities to ponder. It was not surprising to learn from this report that students who had done well in high school had done well in college, or to hear that "the bottom 20% [of the group studied] might have been barred from entering college to the profit of all concerned, including themselves." More disquieting was the fact that the descendants of American-born grandparents stood about half as well in their studies as descendants of foreign-born grandparents. Also, ". . . the sons of fairly well educated parents are not doing so well . . . not half so well, as the sons of relatively uneducated parents." Moreover, "the faces of the inferior students look more typically 'American' than the others."

* The "credit" system is the object of a particularly pointed attack by Dr. William Setchel Learned of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in a paper on "The Quality of the Educational Process in the United States and in Europe" in the Foundation's current bulletin. Dr. Learned contrasts the disciplined convergence upon a single field, in European scholarship, with the dissipation of energy and attention permitted in U. S. classrooms, where Humorist Stephen Leacock pretended to find a student "taking Turkish, music and architecture not because he meant to be choirmaster in a Turkish cathedral but because they came at 9, 10 and 11."