The college student and his problems

Front matter

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The Persona! Problem Series

Prefatory Note

Ceetain books of counsel, teaching young men and women how best to shape their ideals and their lives, played an honorable part in the literature of the nineteenth century, particularly in America, where aspiring youth is eager to learn the secret of noble success. These books, so gratefully remembered by older men, have long since become powerless to aid a younger generation, and their place has not yet been worthily filled. It is our intention to issue a short series of small volumes that shall fulfil the mission of the best of these obsolescent manuals. No one mind, no single experience, would suffice for such a task. Each special field, each special group of personal problems, must be treated separately. There is the problem of the body — how shall its mechanism be perfected and kept in repair; the problem of the mind — how shall its latent powers be wisely developed ; the problem of the spiritual nature — how shall it be best nurtured. Each is viii Prefatory Note

to be treated by one who has given long-continued thought and effort to that particular subject. These are fundamental problems, which all young men and young women must consider. There are others that appeal to great classes of the community : the securing of an education when college is out of the question, the management of life at college, the choice of a profession — to mention no more — and each of these is also to be treated by men of special knowledge and experience.

THE PUBLISHERS.

December 1, 1901.

Electives ....

IX.'

The Choice of Life-Work .

X. APPENDIX: Expenses

THE COLLEGE STUDENT

Why Go to College?

Between the covers of this book, my dear young fellow, you and I are to talk together about your college life and work, possibly much as your father and I talked together not so very many years ago. I am not at all unmindful of the fact that talk is cheap and that advice is often worth but little more than it costs — nothing. Somewhere Thoreau says that all advice is of little value because it is generally offered by men who are not in touch with their times, whose future is already quite behind them, who are out of sympathy with those seeking advice. It is entirely well known, also, that most people really desire approbation, though they may say that they are seeking advice. Between the possibly slight practical value of advice, therefore, and the general unwillingness to accept it, the

B 1 task of one offering the results of his experience and observation is not an enviable one; and it is undoubtedly true that he generally has his labors for his pains.

Moreover, the problems of life are to be solved by each person for himself; and each solution, if at all correct and satisfactory, will bear the distinct stamp of individuality. I may say vrhat I would do "if I were in your place," but the fact remains that if I were in your place I would surely do exactly what you are doing and what you will do. While there is much which may be gained by inquiry, while it pays in every sense of the word to keep your eyes and ears open, after all you must determine your own scheme of life. The experience of others is worth something : it is neither necessary nor desirable that you perpetually burn your fingers in the same fire that scorched the digits of your ancestors; yet your most helpful lessons will come from your own experience — even from your own mistakes. You must work out your own salvation, even with fear and trembling.

You have finished your work at the public high school or the private^ academy; and you are^

Wh^ G-o to College? 3

ready to enter upon some of the liberal courses in college, to take up technical training, or to begin work in the business world. The presumption of this volume is that you will continue your studies. But it is entirely proper to ask why you make this choice. You ought to be able to give a reason for your action, to explain your selection. Not every boy needs a college course, not every boy can master it, not every boy will be benefited by it. Not every boy has the definite purpose, the firm determination, the intellectual grip and grit, the will-power, the self-mastery — such a constant and essential factor in all other mastery — necessary to secure advanced education and sound training, or to make a wise and efficient use of these after they have been secured. It is well to think of this, to give it most careful consideration, to be as sure of your ground as possible. But remember, always, to give yourself the benefit of any doubt. Unless in some peculiar and unusual way you have positive and definite and conclusive assurance that it will be only a waste of time and effort to undertake a college course, enter some college at once.

A serious question sometimes arises here. Shall you enter college if you are obliged to borrow the money with which to meet your expenses ? I have a horror of debt of every description ; and I do not at all accept Mr. Greeley's dictum that debt is a good thing for a young man because it gives him something very definite to work for. But if you are even reasonably sure that you may profitably take a college course, there is no better undertaking for which to borrow money, nor is there any better investment of borrowed money — nothing which pays a larger interest or makes a more sure return. Borrowing should be most emphatically a last resort, and you should borrow the least amount consistent with your necessary expenses, after taking careful account of what you can possibly earn during vacations and at other leisure hours. But if the choice must be made between entering upon life in the bonds of ignorance or of limited education, or in the bonds of debt, the latter is to be chosen — every time. Either condition is deplorable and dangerous ; but there is far more hope of escape from the latter than from the former.

Whi/ Go to College P 5

But why should you go to college at all? What are you to gain by this ? What are you to lose without it? How is it to be helpful to you ? Exactly what is the advantage which you will have over the man who chooses to enter the business world at once and without further training ?

It is entirely necessary to admit at the outset that a large number of the men who are successful in either business or in the professions or in public life — some, even in the world of letters — have not received a college training. As President Barnard once said ; " A mind is not moulded as an earthen vessel is fashioned by the hand of a potter. It moulds itself, by virtue of an inherent force which makes for symmetry or deformity according to the direction given it by consciousness and will. No lack of advantages will prevent a man from securing a valuable education, who is resolved to educate himself. Witness, for instance, a Benjamin Franklin, a Hugh Miller, a Michael Faraday, and an Abraham Lincoln." All these, however, are easily recognized as exceptional men. Some of them are successful in spite of a deficient education.

By extraordinary effort, continued through a long series of years, they have overcome all obstacles and have mastered all difficulties. Through much tribulation they have come at last into their kingdom, ^ — all the more theirs, and all the more valuable and valued, because of the struggle it has cost. They are entitled to great credit for the courage and energy and insistence with which the battle has been fought. But these men very generally bear the scars of the conflict ; rightly or wrongly, regret their earlier limitations ; and believe that they could have gone farther and could have accomplished more if they had enjoyed some of the educational opportunities so easily within the reach of the average boy of to-day. Surely, because some of the hardy pioneers of an earlier day tramped into the West beside their slow-moving oxen, it is not desirable or necessary that we of to-day avoid the Empire Express. These successful non-collegians are always anxious that their sons shall enjoy all the advantages which higher education affords. Chauncey Depew has said that he has been intimately acquainted with hundreds of men who though wealthy were un-

Wh^ ao to College f 7

educated, and that he had never met one of them who did not feel in the presence of cultured people a certain sense of mortification which no money could pay for ; nor had he ever met one of them who was not prepared to sacrifice his entire fortune, if necessary, in order that his son should never feel that mortification.

A few exceptional men are undoubtedly what they are because they were not trammelled by the work of a college. With most of us genius is little more than an infinite capacity for work ; but there are those who are "not as other men." To these the college course, necessarily more or less fixed and rigid and unbending, and the work of the class room and lecture room, necessarily adapted to the average mind, are positive hindrances. They are not born to work in harness, and the straps and buckles which enable the rest of us to pull a load are simply and unendurably galling to them. It is rare indeed, however, that a man may safely count himself in this class ; these exceptions to all general rules and conditions are so few in number that they do not demand serious attention here.

There is another thought, in this connection. The greater number of these men of limited education are now at middle life, even if they have not passed this limit. This means that they have two quite definite advantages. In the first place, they came up in an age when college training was by no means as widespread, as well-nigh universal, as now. All forms of life were far more simple than now, and the mastery of the conditions of success was far less difficult than now. In the business world, markets were more restricted, competition was less keen, organization was less rigid, and the entire movement was more leisurely, — possibly with somewhat more dignity and with somewhat less "hustle." In the professional world the changes have been fewer, as to the old-time callings ; but the newer professions were then almost unknown, and even the " big four " — Law, Medicine, the Ministry, Education — made no such demands upon their followers as are now deemed imperative. The second advantage is that these non-collegians have thus far been competing with their own kind, with men of similar training or lack of training. But the young men of to-day will find all this changed when they reach middle life, — the most trying time for all men. Twenty-five years from now they must compete largely with college-bred men. They will find themselves trotting in quite another class, and they must meet the pace or be barred. The learned professions, so called, the technical callings, the world of literature, the avenues of production and of commerce, public life and service — all are now crowded with collegians, give preference to collegians, offer peculiar opportunity and incentive to collegians. The college man is everywhere in evidence. The day of Mr. Greeley's contemptuous notice, " No college graduates or other horned cattle need apply," has passed. Just as the simpler life, easily mastered by the graduate of the people's college, the district school, developing into more complex conditions, demanded the training offered by the academy and the high school ; so we have already passed to the broader life, calling for higher education, both general and technical. As A. E. Winship puts it : " It is now certain that in every avenue of competition one must face elaborately trained and educated men and women. A boy who played old-fashioned baseball would stand as good a chance in a modern football game under the new rules of the game, as a ' smart ' man untrained will stand in the near future, in any line of public activity."

Every young man of normal temperament and natural ambition finds his thoughts and desires running out along three lines. First, naturally, he desires to live. By this is meant something more than mere existence. In this country almost any one can manage to exist. The exceptions are so rare that a case of failure through other than natural causes — sickness or accident — is at once noted in the daily press as so exceptional as to demand attention. A death by starvation — even one, in a population of seventy-five millions — calls for an associated press despatch with scare-heads. So easy of solution is the problem of mere existence that we are at times almost tempted to think that it is too easy ; that perhaps it would be better for us all if the Wandering Willies and the Counts Canoftomatovitch found it just a little more difficult to keep soul and body together. No normal young man, therefore, is ever very

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anxious over the prospect of his " getting a living."

But you are demanding more than this, and rightly. You hope to have reasonable comfort of body : a body well fed, well clothed, well housed. Nothing extravagant may be in your mind ; but you desire food that will be wholesome and palatable and sufficient, clothing that will not only give comfort but will enable you to appear among your fellows without hesitation and without fear of comment of any sort, and a home of some sort which shall at least be more and better than the four walls of a hall bedroom in some semi-public boarding house. You wish to have your share of the pleasures and recreations of life. Books, magazines, the daily and weekly press : these must minister to your higher tastes. Some day you hope and expect to look across the table, level into the cool gray eyes of one who has gladly cast in her lot with you, who is to be a help-meet indeed. You desire to know something of true social life, of the delights of friendship. The enjoyment of travel must be yours ; the world must open to you in many ways.

12 The College Student and His Prohlems

And, second, you are hoping to become a man among men. You wish to size yourself up with your fellows, with no sense of inferiority of stature. You propose to touch elbows with others, to put shoulder to shoulder, to carry your share of the public burden, to prove yourself a worthy citizen. You hope that the time will come when your experience and your observation will count for something, when men will turn to you for advice and counsel, when they will desire to know your opinions before they enter upon some given undertaking, when your going and coming will be of some moment in the community, when possibly the public service will open to you, when your words will be quoted and your judgment will receive due deference. You are not at all willing to be a nonentity, to be unknown, to live in a back room on a back street, to have no one care whether you are at home or abroad, to have the community entirely indifferent to your existence, to be a cipher among the figures which go to make up the sum of life, an integer on the wrong side of the decimal point, or a minus quantity ; you are not willing to remain a human flint which never by any chance strikes fire.

Lastly, you wish to accomplisli something which will endure. This thought may not come to you very often just now, and may be rather vague when it does come ; but it will grow upon you with advancing years. The saddest thought imaginable is that with death comes oblivion ; that all in which you have been interested, for which you have wrought, to which you have given yourself — your very self, that all this may come to an end when your eyes close in your last sleep ; that it has all been so very finite as to deserve no place whatever in the great infinite plan which is being worked out through the ages ; that, after all, you have built with hay and and straw and sticks and stubble ; that when your own eyes lose their lustre, there are no other eyes that are shining brighter because at some time you have looked into them with human sympathy and affectionate interest ; than when your hand is marble-cold, there is no hand which still feels the warmth of your grasp in that hour in which you brought new hope to one almost in despair ; that when your heart has ceased to beat, there is no heart throbbing with high aspiration and renewed courage because once you put your

14 The College Student mid His Problems

heart against it as friend to friend and brother to brother ; that not a single human being has found the world better, and the skies brighter, and the horizon wider, and the stars of God shining with clearer light, because you have lived and loved and served in your day. No one willingly chooses such a fate as this. The rather does every man desire the grateful and loving remembrance of his fellows, and strive to so live that many will keep his memory green.

But these three longings of the human soul — for life, for influence and power and mastery, for ability to perpetuate its thoughts and purposes and to build that which abideth — these three cannot find satisfaction in a small and unintelligent and uncertain life. Only the mind which becomes public and large can ever enter into the highest joys of life. And only the mind which is early and thoroughly and wisely disciplined can possibly and surely hope to become public and large. As I have already admitted, you may secure this discipline outside the walls of a college. Some men have done this, but the surest road is that trodden by hundreds and thousands during all the past — the college, rich in oppor-

Wht/ ao to College? 15

tunity, in association, in fellowship, in tradition, in all that is stimulating and helpful. Here you will find clearer judgment, a wider horizon, higher ideals of culture and of manhood than you have ever known before. All this will not come to you suddenly; it will grow with your growth. It will not come without effort ; you will get nothing at all if you simply stand at the foot of the ladder, with your mouth open, longing. But here as never before will you find incentive and opportunity combined.

Do not for a moment understand me to say that the conditions at college are ideal. Often they are far otherwise, and of this we will talk more specifically by and by. But this much may be said without fear of contradiction : that no sincere, earnest, faithful student, taking a well-chosen course at an equally well-chosen college, ever regretted such action or thought his four years thrown away. No matter what the superstructure is to be, you will always be glad that you laid the foundation deep and broad and strong.

I have been trying to tell you why you ought to go to college. It may help you in making your decision to know that the best business men of to-day very generally favor the graduate, preferring him to the non-graduate — all other things being equal ; and look for more intelligent effort, a wider outlook, a firmer grasp, more rapid advancement than are possible to the average man who has been denied the privilege of higher training. It is entirely true that the college-bred boy must begin at the bottom, and that at the outset he appears to have lost time, — wandering about among the dead languages and philosophy and the history of the past and fine-spun theories of the present, while the " other fellow " has mastered the elements of his business or calling, and is already well up the ladder. But the college man is destined to climb faster and higher. He does not reach the end of his tether nearly so soon as the " other fellow," and, all other things being equal, he soon masters the other fellow as being simply one of the incidents of the situation. It may interest you to know that about one per cent of the entire population of this country has received a higher education, yet this one per cent holds more than forty per cent of all the positions of confidence and trust

Wh^ G-o to College? 17

and profit which it is in the power of the American people to grant. For some good reason, your fellow-citizens have thus officially and formally recorded their approval of the results of sound and advanced education. It is especially noteworthy in this connection that as these positions rise in the scale of importance and emolument — and it is entirely proper that you think of both phases of success — the per centum of college men increases. In hewing your way through life there is constant and ample proof of the truth of the old saying that an educated man has a sharp axe in his hand, while the uneducated man has a dull one.

It may be well to remind you that in all technical work the demand for well-trained men is now almost imperative. If you are to be at all successful as a mechanical engineer, as a civil engineer, as an electrical engineer, as a sanitary engineer, as an architect, and if through such callings, or through others like these, you are to advance to such positions as manager of some great commercial organization or president of some large undertaking in the field of production, you will find the courses in the schools of applied science an absolute necessity. It is practically impossible, now, to succeed without having made good use of such opportunities ; and certainly it will be impossible twenty years from now, when it will be too late for you to make good any present neglect. It is hardly necessary to do more than actually examine the requirements of the schools of law, of medicine, of theology, to understand the change which has come in that direction, and the rapidity with which these institutions are beginning to base their own work on that which has earned the bachelor's degree.

So I think I am quite warranted in believing that you are going to college. I hope you are really going^ and that you are not one of those who are sent. It is not pleasant to be put here or there, by other people, with no consultation of your own wishes. It will make all the difference possible if you are going of your own choice, willingly, gladly. The work which is done under compulsion is rarely very successful, and this is surely one reason why students fail. And I hope you are entering upon this new field with a high courage, born of an intelligent appreciation of the

Whi/ G-o to College? 19

fact that practically every condition of your college life favors your success. The work of the institution is adapted to the average man. If you happen to be a little below the average in either ability or preparation or determination or will power, you will have to work a little harder in order to hold your own — but you can hold it, by faithful endeavor ; never fear about that. These five elemental and fundamental characteristics I hope you will develop and cultivate : — Sobriety of thought : as the very opposite of the only too general flippant temper of American life. The great questions of time and eternity are not to be regarded as of trifling importance. The problems of life are many and grave, and have taxed the wisdom and the strength of generations of men who have been both wise and strong ; and you are not to dismiss them with some smart remark, or with a sneer. It is easy to be " funny " at tlie expense of serious things, but it is destructive of all mental wholesomeness to be so. I am not suggesting that you become old beyond your years, but that you treat weighty matters with a temper and attention befitting their importance.

Simplicity of life : for only so will you, as either student or graduate, find time for real life, the life about which we have been already talking together. The constant tendency, in college and out, seems to be toward complexity, toward a vast aggregation of the unnecessary even if not of the positively undesirable, toward customs and precedents and manners which eat the heart out of the day before the real day's work is well begun, which demand hours at night which were far better given to earnest thought and strenuous endeavor.

Absolute integrity : without which one cheats himself of far more than he cheats the world, easily and entirely defeats the very end of his college life, and runs swiftly and surely into entanglement and confusion and dire disaster.

Courage : since th^ determined will, the indomitable temper, the " I will it " of a born autocrat, the self-mastery which must precede all other mastery — these and more are possible only to the brave soul.

Strength : which is the sympathetic and intelligent development and the successful coordination of all the powers of mind, body, and spirit ;

and without this development and coordination no man is well educated or well trained, nor can he possibly hope to secure the broadest and best education or the soundest training.

But all this means simply that you will undertake your work in the fear of God, which is the beginning of all wisdom ; and will ground your work on righteousness of life, which is the only sure and ever sure foundation. Taking up your new life in this spirit, you need have neither thought nor fear of failure.

II

It is settled, then, that you are going to college. The next and very natural question is, what college ?

If your father is a college-bred man, you will almost instinctively turn to his alma mater. You have often talked of this, while you were at your preparatory work ; have talked of it so much that you regard the question as practically settled. Naturally enough — since with this college you are already acquainted, you know its traditions and precedents, you have caught something of its spirit. Your father would like to have you tread the paths with which his feet were once so familiar ; would like to know that you are reviving his fame in the old literary society (generally with some classic name); enjoys the thought of your singing the old songs in the one-time chorus or musical union ; is glad to know that his interest in athletics is to be renewed by having you on the college team ; and very generally favors your becoming one of his fellow alumni. Possibly he has already taken you down or up to a commencement, has introduced you to the president and to some of the older members of the faculty, has had you dine with him at the house of his fraternity, has shown you his old room in the still older dormitory, and has tramped with you for a whole afternoon — over the hills and far away, but with the college town ever in sight. He will not understand why you even think of going elsewhere ; possibly he will object to your going elsewhere. If he is loyal to the crimson of Harvard, he surely will not wish you to enlist with the sons of Eli ; if he has come from under the moulding hand of Mark Hopkins, he will be heartbroken to have you go to Amherst ; if he wears the blue and white of Columbia, he can see nothing good in the small " fresh-water " colleges of the interior ; and so on to the end of the chapter.

Now, with some exceptions, it is not going to do you serious harm to go to your father's college. There is a very decided advantage in his interest in all this, and in your interest in it, and in a predetermined interest of the college in you. These relations are mutual, and mutually helpful and beneficial. It is entirely natural to give all these conditions very full weight as reasons for your choice. Yet, after all, it may be very wise for you to decide squarely against your father's alma mater. It is certainly well worth your while to give this matter most serious consideration.

Remember that the college is not an end but a means to an end. You are not going to college simply because it is the fashion to do so in your segment of the social world, or because your father went, or for any similar or similarly inadequate reason. You are going to college for a very definite purpose, to secure a very definite result. You wish to come into some efficient knowledge of yourself, to secure a reasonable mastery of your powers, to change the rather filmy and nebulous and gelatinous mass called your brain into something with clearness of outline and firmness of grasp, to substitute a steady and powerful mental stride for a rather shambling mental gait, to put grip and grit in place of mental flabbiness, and to lay well either the general or the special foundation for the activities of later life. Now your father's college may be just the place where you can accomplish all this, and then again it may not be the place at all ; and it is proper and right that you inquire into this very closely. Almost no part of our American life has changed more, or more rapidly, or more helpfully, during the last twenty-five years — since your father left college — than education. In purpose and plan, in end and means, in theory and methods, in the general curricula and in all the details of the work, there has been almost a revolution. There have been some excesses, as is true of all revolutions ; but the advance has been wonderful and admirable. It would be difficult to express mathematically, by ratios or proportions or per cents, the gains which have been made. You ought to have the benefit of all this ; and it is only wise, therefore, that you question closely, and even sharply, before you reach a final conclusion.