Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/254

248 (distance between base line and small mark at right of ordinate). The ordinates for each of the other professions may be interpreted in the same manner. The data in my possession make possible the study of various other combinations of educational courses, as well as comparisons of them for persons of different ages showing the educational trend, but lack of space prevents a discussion of these facts in the present paper. I will say, however, that the figures do not show combinations of training abroad with that in our home institutions. The spaces on the figures which have to do with training abroad refer only to those persons who failed to make any use whatever of home institutions, at least above high school.

Figures 4 and 5 then show (1) the educational preparation of persons of both sexes for the various professions and (2) a basis of comparison between the two. They answer, too, a very important question: "What kind of preparation has proved most essential to that kind of success which mention in 'Who's Who' means?" They have nothing to do with the question, 'What kind of preparation must the doctor, or the lawyer, or the minister have to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a minister,' but what kind is most likely to put him in the class of doctors, and lawyers, and ministers who achieve eminence. In other words, we are studying selected persons in each profession, but since every man and woman of proper ambition who enters a profession hopes to be one of those selected, the problem has a wide bearing.

In the discussion of the figures which follows I shall, for the sake of directness and with full recognition of the fact that the two are not synonymous, speak of those under each profession whose education stopped with the high school (black portion of the ordinates) as un-educated. Of this class the actor shows by far the greatest number—so large that we could hardly advise the young person with histrionic ambition to go to college merely as an aid to public recognition in his art. There may be other inducements for him, but seemingly not that. Business seems to offer the next largest inducement to the uneducated; 84 per cent, of its devotees belong to that class. Twelve per