c $ 3* b $lam Calk on (going to College H>f)urtleff College bulletin Vol. XIV JANUARY, 1921 N^Tl Issued quarterly by the Trustees of Shurtleff College, Alton, 111. Entered as second-class matter February II, 1908, at the Post Office at Alton. 111., under Act of Congress of July 16. 1894. l—ll— ll— Ill— Plain Talk On Going to College I F YOU are about to finish high school, you are considering whether a college education will pay better than the same time spent in business. That depends entirely on what it costs and what you get out of it. What Does It Cost? In money terms, the average college education costs $500 a year, including your board and room. As you pay for your living whether you are in college or not, the actual cost of education to you is very much less. On this basis, college education is one of the greatest bargains in the world. When you buy Page two an ordinary commodity, you expect to pay something more than what it cost. When you buy education, you pay only one-third of the cost. The rest is made up by friends of the institution. The cost in time is equally reasonable. Look- ing ahead, the four years from 18 to 22 seem a long time, but in their proper perspective those years are a very short period of preparation. Most men do not retire from active business before they are 60, so that college days are little more than one-tenth of your working life. 18 to 22 Then, too, these years are the least productive financially. Average earnings of high school graduates are very small compared to the earning power of a trained man in middle life. But the earlier period is worth infinitely more in ca- pacity to learn and develop. There are many subjects such as foreign languages that it is virtually impossible to master after you have passed the college age. What Do You Get? Bishop McDowell has said that it is as im- possible to estimate what you owe to your col- lege as it is to measure what you owe to your own mother. Still there are certain standards by which we can judge of the more concrete values of college education. First of all applying the lowest test: — Page three Does It Pay Financially? Figured on the basis of average earning power over a period of years, each day of schooling according to the United States Bureau of Edu- cation is worth $9 to the student. In other words, one who stays out of school to earn less than $9 a day is losing, not making money. This is due both to the larger salaries received by educated men and to the rapid increase in their pay after they leave school. The average in- come of the Yale class of 1906 after their gradu- ation was: First year $740 Second year 968 Third year 1 286 Fourth year 1 522 Fifth year 1885 It is safe to say that the average income of members of that class, as in the case of the Princeton class of 1901, during their tenth year out of college was about $4,000. Similar figures are available from many colleges which show the money value of their training. What Business Men Say The best test of the financial rating of a college course is the judgment of leading men in financial and business life. Do they put their money into it? Do they advise you to put your time into it? The list of prominent business men who in the days of their best judgment considered college a wise investment is too long to set down. It includes men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Pear- sons, Jim Hill, Frick, Severance, Stanford. Many of these men did not enjoy educational Page four advantages, but they respected them. Scores of other leaders in the financial world have given of their time and money to colleges so that you might have the best that education can offer. Would they advise YOU to go to college next fall? Ask them. We could quote many such men advising you to go. Here are the words of two who felt the lack of a college course. Their business judgment would be valued in any bank or commercial enterprise in the country today. George M. Reynolds, the biggest banker in the west, says: “I would like to impress on boys ‘GO TO COLLEGE.’ 1 did not go. But I recog- nize that the man who does has a tremen- dous handicap over the boy who has to plod step by step through the school of ex- perience.’’ The greatest steel maker in the world, Charles M. Schwab, writes: “Today industrial conditions favor the college man. Business is conducted on so vast a scale that the broadening effects of higher education write a large figure.’’ It would not be fair to assume that you will “make good’’ in business simply because you are a college man, or fail for lack of that training. The real situation is best stated in the words of a prominent educator: “Considering the time of life when the work of education ought to be done, the most costly education with the minimum of results is that which is picked up here and there as life presents opportunities and as boys improve them. With their well or- dered and enriched courses, the colleges effect for young men an enormous saving of time and costly mistakes.’’ Page five Nor is this merely a question of getting routine knowledge more quickly and systemati- cally. Charles Sabin, president of one of the largest trust companies, writes: “Every employer is looking for the man who can think. One can hire any number of people marvelously skilled in routine or in detail — human machines that will run on splendidly as long as nothing unusual turns up. The well trained college man grasps intricate situations and reduces them to essentials much more quickly than the equally well trained man who has not had the advantage of the broader fundamental education.” George W. Perkins also stated that: “One of the greatest advantages in a college training is that the earnest student can learn to think straight.” These words of big business men should count heavily with those of us who must make our way in the paths which they have marked out. Page six College and Leadership A college course does not guarantee that you will be a leader in your chosen occupation. But college training does guarantee that your chances of becoming a leader are multiplied many times. By the very fact of higher education you are given an advantage over the great mass of yoyr generation. Only those of exceptional ability or opportunity ever qualify for entering college. “Gather into one group 10,000 children” says President Thwing, “and send none of them to Out of every 1000 Pupils who entered the First Grade in 1903-1904 600 Finished the Eighth Grade 300 Entered High School m Finished High School in 1915-1916 38 | entered College | 38 □ Will Graduate 14 from College this Year Page seven college. Only one of them will attain dis- tinction. Gather into another group 40 college graduates and one of them will attain dis- tinction.” Will you be lost among the 10,000 or become one of the 40? In Who’s Who 1917 tl College Graduates 59 % H Others College Trained 14 % D No College Training 27 % Few college men secure positions of leadership the first or even the tenth year after graduation. But take them in the prime of life when they have had time to bring to bear all that the Page eight college has given them of ability to think, to adjust themselves to new situations, to under- stand men, to express their personality, and college trained men are at the front in every walk of life. One-third of the men included in Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography are college trained. Who’s Who for 1917, which contains the latest classification by education shows a striking preponderance of college graduates although only one man in 50 in the entire country is an alumnus of a college. Do not voluntarily throw away your chance of some measure of leadership and distinctive service to your fellows if it is humanly possible for you to enjoy the advan- tages indicated by this overwhelming evidence in getting your start at the college. College and Life It is natural that the first test of the value of college training should be its helpfulness in enabling you to make a living. That is in- dispensable. But a far more distinctive service is its help in making you live. When Aristotle was asked how the educated man differed from the uneducated, he answered: “As the living differ from the dead.” That is still the idea of education. You will find your college days “crammed” with activity and hustle; not mere routine, not seclusion, but the broadest possible contact with the best thought and action and men of all time. And with your own time as well. No groups of equal size rose to the Page nine emergency of the world war more quickly or more unanimously than college students and faculties. This breadth of view and richness of experience beyond the narrow horizon of your “bread and butter’’ routine is something many successful business men have longed for in later life. College gives you this contact; mere getting a living does not. The best expression of what college does for a man along this line is in the words of President Hyde of Bowdoin college: “To be at home in all lands and all ages; to count Nature a familiar acquaintance and Art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men’s work and the criticism of one’s own; to make friends among the men of one’s own age who are to be leaders in all walks of life; to lose oneself in generous enthusiasms and co-operate with others for common ends; to learn manners from students who are gentlemen; and to form character under professors who are Christians — these are the returns of a col- lege for the best four years of one’s life.’’ Spiritual Values in College Life College training is not complete when it gives you material success or even culture. Its aim is not to make us seem greater to the world but to make the world seem greater to us. Mere technical education develops more perfect things but less perfect men. Germany demonstrated that material training without spiritual values is a failure. But from the beginning the Christian college has taught men to develop more perfect material things and to apply them to higher Page ten ideals in life. It trains head and heart to- gether. In other words, it is frankly religious. How Expressed You will like the way colleges express their religion. Students do not constantly and bla- tantly talk about their deepest spiritual experi- ences any more than our war heroes went about discussing their patriotism before the war. But the spirit is there and you will feel it. One way of expressing religion in a Christian college is its spirit of reverence. It is easy to do your best and to make the most of yourself in an atmosphere like that. Equally noticeable in college life is its spirit of service. Many men and women there are looking forward to more than the accumulation Page eleven of money or prestige. They are testing their powers and developing their capacities for the highest usefulness as citizens, in business or the home, in whatever calling they follow. The courses have been broadened to prepare men for many lines of work so that a smaller per cent of college graduates now go into the ministry of the church. But most of them enter the minis- try of life in its larger sense. Service is the key- note of student days and the records of college graduates all over the country show that it has been the master-spirit of college men all through life. Education at a Christian college is complete, well rounded, well proportioned, and the young man is fortunate who finds such an institution at the threshold of his life. Page twelve By-Products If we had already enumerated all the ad- vantages of college life, it would more than repay your time and interest. This is not all, however. There are by-products — many of them — each with a distinct value. First of all, college means a good time. This includes athletics and debating and social activities. It includes other things of greater importance. Alice Freeman Palmer, when she was president of Wellesley, once said that college life ought to be the best sort of good time — not the good time of self-indulgence or moving along lines of least resistance, but the good time of generous friendships and high ideals. College days are happy days, full of enjoyment and fun. Students do not go to college for pleasure, but they have a good time while they are going to college. That is one of the by-products. Listen to any of them talk about their inter- ests, or better still, to a group of old graduates. You will get a new idea of what college life means in enjoyment and friendship and happy memories. There is a freedom of as- sociation that is rare in the business world. Again and again Page thirteen you will hear the non-college man express his regret that he has no school to go back to, no place of which he can say all through life — “This is my Alma Mater. I am a part of all the young life that will flow through this institu- tion as long as life lasts.” Old men of eighty and young men of twenty-two come back to Commencement year after year; it “gets” them all. The best associations of life center around their college. Without any particular effort in that direction, the average college is a splendid type of de- mocracy. Here you have real equality of oppor- tunity. This, too, is one of the by-products. Very rarely will you find elsewhere in society a group in which all the members are of practi- cally the same age and with the same degree of preparation. The college gives this. Certainly nowhere else can you find a place where family influence and money and the externals of social prestige count less and your own merit more. Whether your father has a million or is a day laborer will make very little difference to your roommate or your classmate. On the other hand, what YOU do and what YOU are is all important. You will meet students from many lands and from every class in society and the invariable rule is “May the best man win.” It is unconscious democracy in practice. Many a man works his way through school by doing jobs that would reflect on his social standing at any place but a college. Waiting on table, janitor service — these are common occupations and students who secure their education by such sacrifice are honored the more for their spirit. College days are a fine training for citizenship. Each student has a place in the activities of the Page fourteen little commonwealth. From the day he enters school, he learns a lesson in loyalty that is in- valuable. The army called it esprit de corps and took infinite pains to develop it. In school we call it college spirit and find its expression every- where. You hear it in the college yell and the college song. You see it on the football field and the track. Those are some of the outward ex- pressions. In a quieter way it means the willingness of each student to give the best he has for his school — every ounce of strength in the game, every moment of time in grinding preparation. LOYALTY — that is the keynote of college spirit — not loyalty exhausted when you have given the yell or celebrated a victory. Loyalty to your fellow-students, to yourself, to your college is the rule. And not mere loyalty to the buildings and old associations but to THE THINGS THE COLLEGE STANDS FOR. It is in this spirit that you will find fellowship with the best movements and men of your time and become a member of that larger company who are placing the stamp of college ideals and loyalty on the nation. Page fifteen 05953 159 Faithorn Co., Chicago