CHOOSING A COLLEGE
The choice of a college, according to this testimony, is largely dependent upon one of three things,—the location of the institution (involving expense), the influence of friends or relatives, and the advantages the institution may offer for special training. The selection of the college, however, is not so important as formerly. Every prosperous institution now gives sufficient opportunity for the acquirement of knowledge and training. Apart from the prestige which the name of a large and well-known university or college gives to its graduates in after life, the difference between the values imparted by scores of American institutions is not considerable. There are at least a hundred institutions in America sufficiently well equipped to give a boy the foundation of mental training that a college education is intended to supply. Their libraries are filled with books; their laboratories contain expensive and elaborate modern appliances; their gymnasiums are preëminent in equipment; their instructors are drawn from the best scholars in the country and also from the finishing schools of Europe; the spirit of athletics and undergraduate leadership are, as a rule, strongly emphasized, while the fraternity and social systems afford rare opportunities for friendship. Temptations and college evils vary comparatively little in different institutions.
Blair Arch, Princeton University
The advantages of contact and the acquirement of experience through the laboratory of a big city institution are frequently more than counterbalanced by the close fellowship and the lack of distractions in a small country college. It is true that the investigators of the Carnegie Foundation found a large variation in the amount of money expended by different institutions to educate a student. It is my belief, after visiting more than five hundred institutions in North America, that the quality of instruction in any one of these institutions of the first grade does not vary sufficiently to render the choice of a college on the ground of educational advantages a matter of great moment. The values which the small college loses from inferior equipment are usually offset by the more direct access of the student to the personality of the teacher, and often by closer friendships with fellow-students.
Indeed, educational results are not always commensurate with material advantages. As President Garfield said, a man like Mark Hopkins on one end of a bench and a student on the other end is still the main essential of a college. Many years ago Henry Clay visited Princeton, and was asked by President McLean (Johnnie, as he was familiarly and popularly called) to sit down in the president’s study. The furniture was not elaborate in those days, nor did it consist of the most solid material. Mr. Clay sat down, and the rickety old chair which was proffered him sank beneath his weight. The statesman, rising from the floor, said solemnly, “Dr. McLean, I hope that the other chairs of this institution are on a more permanent foundation.” Indeed, the foundation of learning in those days was laid upon the personality of great teachers who, like Dr. McLean, had personal contact with the students, making up in individual interest what was lacking in material equipment.
It is important that the student should choose instructors quite as carefully as institutions. What a man selects when he gets to college—his studies, his teachers, and his friends—will prove far more vital to him than the institution he happens to choose.