Working Men's College

“ But they are encouraged to feel themselves members of a great coöperation society. So soon as possible, they are commissioned as teachers themselves, and are put in a position to take preparatory classes in the College. A majority of the finance-board consists of students. Let us now see what is the programme which grows out of such a plan. I have not at hand the schedule of exercises for the current year. I must therefore give that which was in force in the autumn of 1859, when by paying half-a-crown I became a member of the Working-Men's College. ”

“ It is the old story that the more you do the more time you find in which to do. This active school life prepares one for strenuous life in the world. However, there is great danger in overdoing this matter. College life should be secondary to your studies. We go to college to learn and we must not sacrifice our mental and spiritual training for minor things. A man should not neglect his social training, either, but this, too, is a secondary matter.
“The working student is treated as a social equal by most people in most colleges. ”

“ These are opportunities that open peculiarly to the father, and he should take advantage of them.
I believe that every boy should be encouraged to acquire a college education [45] and that he should be made to pay for it. We hear a good deal of talk nowadays about the lack of real advantage that the college man has over the other fellow. Thousands of college men fail in their struggles with the work-a-day world, and often you find a degree man working in a subordinate capacity to a man of his own age who missed a college education. ”

“ But before our American colleges become an absolute factor in the business capacities of men their methods of study and learning will have to be radically changed. I have had associated with me both kinds of young men, collegiate and non-collegiate, and I must say that those who had a better knowledge of the practical part of life have been those who never saw the inside of a college and whose feet never stepped upon a campus. ”

“ One class emphasizes the importance of true culture and of making ardent, methodical, and independent search after truth, irrespective of its application; the other believes that practice should go along with theory, and that the college should introduce the student into the practical methods of actual life.
They are both, in a measure, right. There are forces at work in society to strengthen the demand that colleges teach the branches of industry, as well as prepare men for the so-called learned professions. The demand is based on the worth and dignity of intelligent labor. ”

“ The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there."
The value of the college training of to-day cannot be too strongly emphasized. You cannot save time nor money by omitting it, whatever the profession on which you enter. The college is becoming a part of life. For a long time the American college was swayed by the traditions of the English aristocracy. Its purpose was to certify to a man's personal culture. The young man was sent to college that he might be a member of a gentler caste. ”

“ Two of them had supported themselves while at the University by work similar to mine. One of them was janitor of a church and the other had been a waiter at a restaurant. I cannot say that I regard the experience as involving any great hardship. I never felt at any time, while I was at the University, that this employment which was obligatory was of any disadvantage to me, except that it took more time than I wished to devote to work. My experience is that there is more of a democratic spirit in universities and colleges than is found elsewhere in the world. ”

“ Necessarily the quality of work was low, though many institutions struggled for the maintenance of respectable standards. One college president frankly said: "We are liberal about letting young men into the Freshman class, but particular about letting them out." ”

“ Far be it from me to depreciate the value of a college education. I believe in its advantages too firmly. But no young man need feel hampered because of the lack of it. If business qualities are in him they will come to the surface. It is not the college education; it is the young man. Without its possession as great and honorable successes have been made as with it. Men are not accepted in the business world upon their collegiate diplomas, nor on the knowledge these imply. They are taken for what they are, for what they know. ”

“ Probably the man who keeps at work at the business he is going to follow through life, during the years when other men are studying in college, acquires more information that will be "useful" to him in his practical career. But the college man who has not thrown away his college life comes from the training of his alma mater with a mind as highly disciplined as are the wrist and eye of the skilled swordsman. ”

“ I know that there are more non-college men driving street-cars than there are college men. But that doesn't influence me. You could get a job now. Not much of a position, perhaps, but something self-respecting and fairly well-paying. It would teach you many things. You might get a knowledge of human nature that no college could give you. But there's something—poise—self-confidence—assurance—that nothing but college can give you. ”

“ I was told a college man could succeed better than a man without a trained mind. I found the educated men advancing beyond me in position and salary, even though younger, at the office where I worked. I always looked up to college men and women, as to my elders, with a certain respect and admiration for their superiority—derived as I believed from their college course. ”

“ The work of the classroom and examination-hall makes for democracy, while the social life of the college makes for conservatism and aristocracy. Campus life is increasingly difficult to understand because of its growing complexity. The material needs of our time have created a class of undergraduates bent on becoming specialists, and these men have increasingly less time for either college work or college life; for them the undergraduate course is something to be hurried through as a short cut to professional efficiency. ”

“ It is rather its part to produce men and women with the power to think clearly and independently, who recognize that teaching and home-making are both fine arts worthy of careful and patient cultivation, and not the necessary accompaniment of a college diploma. College graduates ought to make, and I believe do make, better teachers, more considerate husbands and wives, wiser fathers and mothers, but the chief function of the college is larger than this. The aim of the university and the great technical school is to furnish preparation for some specific profession. ”

“ It is true that there is an increasing, and just now, an unusual demand for college-bred men in all walks of life. The prescribed preliminaries to legal and medical education are, step by step, approaching graduation from college, and have reached it, in some instances, while these professional courses themselves have been extended and deepened, till they are now nearly or quite on a par with the old liberal training with which they are co-ordinated in the modern university. ”

“ While expenses are now higher than they were, compensation for labor is also a good deal higher and employment is much more easily found than during the years from 1893 to 1897. The question as to whether a collegiate education is available to every young man in this country I think is entirely dependent upon the question as to whether it is desired. I have no doubt that the experiences of many whom I knew at the University, which experiences 87 were similar to mine, could be duplicated in almost any of the larger institutions of the country. ”

“ It was my fortune to attend a college situated in a small town, as such locations are always best for the one who has to make his way. Work was easily secured, and as my desire was to get an education by my labor, I seized every opportunity for making a dime. Serving as janitor, making fires in the early morning hours, raking snow and ice from the college walks in the winter, raking leaves on the 48 campus in the fall and spring, serving as clerk on Saturdays and other work of this kind paid my way. ”

“ Seen from the inside, it more often means on its positive side, an ingenuous interest in the more distinctly social phases of college life, and on its negative side, a freedom from the more imperious and sordid cares of the impecunious. We are assured on high authority that in at least one of the great universities for men, the idle and unprofitable class of rich boys has been awakened to a sense of responsibility and opportunity which is bringing splendid returns to the life of the institution. ”

“ The universities and colleges, on the other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more important than skill. They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make "good company" of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended; this is what we hear among college-trained people when they compare their education with every other sort. ”

“ There is more reason in the complaint I have heard many times from mothers, that college gives their daughters a distaste for social life, and a rather ungracious disregard for its amenities and obligations.{71} But college does not give men a distaste for social life. On the contrary, it is the best possible training for that bigger, broader field in which the ceaseless contact with their fellow-creatures rounds and perfects the many-sidedness of manhood. ”

“ Channing says: "The grounds of a man's culture lie in his nature, and not in his calling;" and, in keeping with this, the primary aim of a college is to train men. Yet, it should be the door of approach to all professions. The studies pursued in college are the foundations of the practice of the various professions, and a young man does himself and his profession no credit when he neglects to master a college course because of his impatience to rush into a professional career, and thus help to swell the army of poorly-equipped professional men. ”

“ This fall, at my request, Congress created over 200,000 new work-study jobs on America's college campuses. Work-study helps young people to work their way through college, often by serving their school. ”

“ I know of an American college professor in one of our successful State universities who had this to say of the male graduates of his institution, after having watched the output for a number of years: “They are all right, quite satisfactory as machines for the production of material wealth or for the maintenance of certain forms of professional skill, but as for ideas of their own or being creators or men with the normal impulses and passions of manhood they do not fulfill the requisite in any respect. They are little more than types, machines, made in the image and likeness of their college. ”

“ This would pay my board and room rent. Other odd jobs, he suggested, would help out in tuition and incidentals.
School began on Tuesday; so Monday found me speeding for college, with ninety dollars to begin a college career. Never did a man approach a college with less of self-confidence than I. The cows, as I crossed the fields to the college with a number of students-to-be, seemed to look at me with hungry eyes; for why should I not suppose that even the cows around a great institution of learning were sufficiently educated to know a green freshman. ”

“ In the East the high schools are breaking from the “preparatory status” to the college, and are looking to the good they can do for their pupils who get no more schooling. Trade schools are growing up within and beside the high schools, as the professional schools grew up within and beside the colleges. The college itself is in question by labor union committees and inaugural addresses. The university is becoming professional; even Arts and Letters in preparing teachers and general practitioners of arts and letters. The industrial movement has now the economic interpretation of history. ”

“ In an average institution four thoroughly good men carry six other men. A few give the college its character; the majority are a burden, and some men in this majority gloat over their supposed right to be lugged by the college. Any rule which should rid colleges of mere place-holders, of men weak in character, negligent in work, and far behind the times in scholarship would double the usefulness and the patronage of colleges in ten years. But if certainty of tenure is bad in college, it must be worse elsewhere. ”

“ But, nevertheless, the fact cannot be shaken that the old American colleges have been admirable places for the training of men. Let the roll of graduates of any leading institution be scrutinized, or even the record of a single class selected at random, and it will be seen that the number of life failures is very small, and the number of useful, intelligent, high-minded and upright careers very large. ”

“ While the authorities have turned their attention primarily to the undergraduate division and its numerical increase, they have at the same time, and largely with the same end in view, endeavoured to give it more of the character of a "gentleman's college", that is to say, an establishment for the cultivation of the graces of gentility and a suitable place of residence for young men of spendthrift habits. ”