A COLLEGE CAREER—IS IT WORTH WHILE?
President Butler, of Columbia, Points
Out That Self-Made Men Wish
Their Sons to Go to College.
Business men are sometimes contemptuous toward the young college graduate's bumptiousness and lack of practical knowledge. Educators, on the other hand, give a strong argument, backed by statistics and corroborating detail, to prove that a college education is the best foundation in all the work of life. The subject has been discussed probably since men of education first left the cloisters and went out into the world.
President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, presents this brief for the college man:
No doubt there are many who believe a college education is a hindrance to the necessary business wisdom of the age. There are merchants down-town who will tell you how they started at ten or fourteen to sweep out the office and rose, by virtues and industry, to become members of the firm. This is true. But you follow the career of the office-boy who began his utilitarian studies with a broom, and the college boy who began with his books, and you will find that when the office-boy reaches thirty he is still an employee, whereas the college graduate is probably at that age his employer.
Statistics show that out of ten thousand successful men in the world, taken in all classes of life, eight thousand are college graduates. Look at the tremendous increase of educational effort all over the United States in the last few years. Why, I have parents come to me with tears in their eyes and ask me to tell them how they can get their boys through college with only the small sum of money they can afford to do it with. Even your self-made man isn't satisfied unless his son can go to college.