College graduate

“ Once upon a time a certain old graduate found himself in the midst of a beautiful college campus. On all sides he beheld old beloved scenes and well-remembered landmarks; but also he discovered new haunts, new places, unfamiliar and somehow unwelcome to him. And about him, as he stood there gazing, came and went many of the same recognizable types of lovable undergraduate humanity; and yet here in the crowd strolled one sort and over there across the way stood another sort that seemed strange and unexpected. ”

“ I know it, but the average college graduate, I repeat, has loftier ideals and is less materialistic than the average man who has not gone to college. I wish that I could believe that the college gives him those ideals. I can't, however. The colleges draw the best that society has to offer; therefore, they graduate the best. ”

“ Whatever degrees you carry from school or college, whatever distinction you may acquire in your career, no title will ever mean quite so much, will ever be quite so noble, as that of gentleman.
"A keen and sure sense of honor," says Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard University, "is the finest result of college life." The graduate who has not acquired this keen and sure sense of honor, this thing that stamps the gentleman, misses the best thing that a college education can impart. ”

“ The practical value of a college education is seriously questioned by many good people unacquainted with the facts. There is abundant evidence, however, which goes to prove that the college graduate has better chances for success than the non-graduate. ”

“ If a college undergraduate is ready to be honest with himself, he must say, "If I am consistent with mediocre work in college, it is likely that the men in my class who graduate with honor will have three times my chances of success in the Law School, and the men who graduate in my class with highest honor will have nearly ten times my chances of success." ”

“ The American undergraduate is more than ever before contemporaneous with all that is real and important in modern existence. He is filled with enthusiasm for civic and social and religious investigation and improvement. With self-reliant courage he works his way through college, tutoring, waiting on table, and performing other real services. He debates with zeal economics, immigration, and labor questions. Indeed, the modern American university [71] is taking increasingly firmer hold upon the life of the nation. The college graduate of fifty years ago was more or less a thing apart. ”

“ At that the old graduate laughed with much amusement: "So you think I have been worrying about the college, do you? You really think that you, little man, are of sufficient consequence to cause anxiety for the university? Princeton certainly is changed in many ways—many things are much better than when I was in college; we did not have that magnificent library, nor such athletic facilities, nor the honor system, nor many advantages that you have. Yes, many things are much better than when I was in college, but you do not happen to be one of them. ”

“ What the old man has to say to the young man, the teacher to the pupil, the father to the son, at the moment when the gates of the great world are flung open to the college graduate, has undergone but little modification in a thousand years, and has become very well known to all collegians long before they take their degree. ”

“ In the dogma expressed here it seems to me you treat the university graduate, who has had four years' earnest study, as if he were in kilts, and the girl in short skirts. Those men and women have wrested from the college tradition the right to say what they are going to do, in their junior, if not their sophomore year, and to come out after their graduation from economical and sociological courses and to be presented to the curriculum you have, is little short of absurd. ”

“ As not more than one young man in five hundred goes to college, and as this one-five-hundredth of the young men furnishes four-sevenths of our distinguished public officers, it appears that a collegian has seven hundred and fifty times as many chances of being anPage 204 eminent Governor or Congressman as other young men."
The college graduate generally has the pre-eminence among professional men. The proportion of successful men in the professions is difficult to obtain, but if a wide reputation be regarded as the criterion of success, the college-bred men take the lead. ”

“ With the increasing specialization of the higher education, the attitude of the graduate is likely to be increasingly humble; and a college man will not be led to feel that he is expected to know everything about everything. ”

“ We would by no means interfere with this graduation in the schools; but, in addition to this, there ought, we think, to be some goal of more elevated attainment, which might excite the attention and emulation of those whose opportunities admit of their being well educated. Let it bear the title of Bachelor of Arts, or Master of Arts, or graduate, and, if a definite meaning be affixed to it by the college authorities, it cannot fail to be as well understood as the unmeaning terms, sophomore, freshman, senior-wrangler, &c. ”

“ It is true all the good gifts I have named may be secured without the aid of the college. We all know young men and women who have had no college training, who are as cultivated, rational, resourceful, and happy as any people we know, who excel in every one of these particulars the college graduates about them. I believe they often bitterly regret the lack of a college education. And we see young men and women going through college deaf and blind to their great chances there, and afterwards curiously careless and wasteful of the best things in life. ”

“ While it is the work of science and scholarship, roughly what is known in American usage as graduate work, that gives the university its rank as a seat of learning and keeps it in countenance as such with laymen and scholars, it is the undergraduate school, or college, that still continues to be the larger fact, and that still engages the greater and more immediate attention in university management. ”

“ The college, moreover, should start the graduate interest in philanthropic and serious enterprises which in themselves furnish suitable as well as pleasing relaxation to hundreds of American university men. ”

“ It has been well said that college graduates, more than any other class of men, do what they wish to do, not because of inherited wealth or social position, but because of the emancipating knowledge of opportunity and self. ”

“ The average technical-school graduate may be justly accused of being deficient in sympathetic points of contact with his fellow man. He is prepared for a too special vocation.
In regarding, upon the other hand, the arts colleges it is well, momentarily, to eliminate from the consideration those students to whom such an institution is but an intermediate step to medical, law, divinity, or technical schools, and to consider the normal college man whose days of study end with his graduation. ”

“ Then again the college alumnus can not without further investigation be accepted as a standard, for even the highly educated male, as appears from the facts presented by Professor Dexter in his recent study of 'High Grade Men: in College and Out.' He shows that hardly more than one third, 37 per cent, of the 8,603 supposedly successful and prominent Americans mentioned in 'Who's Who' are college graduates, and only 2.2 per cent, of all now living alumni are included among these 8,000 supposedly higher type and most representative of living Americans. ”

“ Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors! ”

“ A story by an anonymous writer which “gives us a singularly intimate view of what we think must be a unique element in American college life. It presents the life of the small college from the standpoint, not of the student, nor of the professor, nor of the graduate, nor of the outsider, but of the Faculty family that has lived all its days on the college campus.” (Bookm.) “The plot is simple, the incidents 177those of the narrow round of life in a small college, the theme the old-fashioned one of love, but the book is saturated with life.” (Outlook.) ”

“ It’s hardly a college since it has no student body nor faculty. Rather, both are one at the haven. Anyone admitted is a scholar or potential scholar anxious to devote himself to learning. I mean for its own sake. ”

“ It may be that for many men four years of undergraduate life are not sufficient to make a college impress deep, or, to appearances, lasting; but if in any measure it is real, that influence must tell, not only on the years immediately succeeding, but through the whole of life. ”

“ Fascinating fields of knowledge are waiting to be explored; possibilities of doing, as well as of knowing, are on every side; new and dear friendships enlarge and sweeten dreams of future study and work, and the young student cannot afford quivering nerves or small lungs or an aching head any more than bad taste, rough manners, or a weak will. Handicapped by inheritance or bad training, she finds the plan of college life itself her supporter and friend. ”

“ A hint of friendly patronage crept into the manner of the junior. “My dear chap, college isn't worth doing at all unless you do it right. You're here to get in with the best fellows and to make connections that will help you later. ”

“ Their eyes are upon the stadium rather than upon the library; the delights of scholarship influence them less than ambition for leadership and the importance of “making good” in student affairs. They are in college for “popular” reasons, and too often fail to learn how to think. But they are eager, versatile, adaptable, with a ready capacity for social adjustment and modern expression. ”

“ After we have said much concerning the life and the work of the American undergraduate, there is still a valuable thing which the college should impart to him, and through which he should become enabled to present with greater charm and with greater force the message which is in his soul. This valuable thing, at once both idealism and incentive, is the undergraduate’s individual message to the world. It may be composed of knowledge, the ability to think, the faculty of relaxation, and the power to do faithfully and successfully some given task. ”

“ Taking a survey of all the college men I know, and have known, I cannot be sure that the addition of a college education makes much difference in the end. The man who succeeds with a college degree would have succeeded without it. It is personality that counts. Character rules the world, be it educated at college or in the gutter.
I passed into my second year in the following spring, and then in turn from sophomore to third year without distinction, without disgrace or notable incident. I learned to smoke and began to shave, and believed myself to be a thoroughly sophisticated youth. ”

“ For some students, too, we must conclude that trivialities and immoralities bury far out of sight the true meaning of college training and life-work; but in other students, and these are the majority, underneath his curriculum and his customs, his light-heartedness, his loves, and his seeming listlessness, one may discern the real American undergraduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and strenuously eager for those great campaigns of his day and generation in which the priceless guerdon is the “joy of the working.” ”

“ for education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. Others cared only for the mental culture, and were in danger of over-studying, under the delusion which pervades New England that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better. ”

“ If I took one of these college positions and proved efficient, and had good luck, I should keep on knowing all the rest of my life about the same sort of people, for the girls who go to college are from the more fortunate classes. ”

“ The student leads his life noisily and hurriedly. He scarcely takes time to see it all plainly without dust and confusion. There is all about him a blurred sense of motion and duties. His culture lies upon him in lumps. He does not allow it time to impress him. College is a bewildering episode rather than a place of clear vision. ”

“ But the main point is the will and determination of alma mater to have, and to have respected, standards of undergraduate conduct and achievement. In the face of such determination the loftiest structure buttressed by college tradition is a mere house of cards. Happily the mind of youth is plastic, and the hoariest college custom may on occasion be treated exactly as if it wasn't there. Certain qualities of heart and mind, with generous effort to improve opportunity, are minimum qualifications for membership in a college. ”

“ The student through college is a traveler, sometimes examining in detail, sometimes superficially. He gives a glance and remembers; he takes notes and thinks closely. He sees the all-surrounding regions of knowledge, and although he may make but slight researches in particular lines, he knows where to return in the after years for deeper research and ampler knowledge.
7. College life leads to self-discovery. It tests a man’s powers, and reveals to him his weakness. ”

“ The greatest thing any friend or teacher, either in school or college, can do for a student is to furnish him with a personal ideal. The college professors who transformed me through my acquaintance with them—ah, they were few, and I am sure I did not have a dozen conversations with them outside their class rooms—gave me, each in his different way, an ideal of character, of conduct, of the scholar, the leader, of which they and I were totally unconscious at the time. ”