Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/406

402 The elements of success are innate, their combination is complex; without them a man can not succeed, with or without a college course. A college professor accustomed to study his students can make reasonable forecast of their future by end of the sophomore year, if he know their home surroundings. Mere success in college studies means nothing of itself for the future; one valedictorian disappears at once after graduation while another quickly becomes a power for good or for evil. A fellow with low grades throughout startles professors, whose work he detested, by becoming a great man.

Not every young man should be urged to go to college; entrance may be the first step on the road to hopeless failure. The fact that a man is willing to go to college, even the fact that he is willing to endure hardship to secure an "education," is no reason of itself why he should have the opportunity at another's expense. He may be very earnest, but he may lack capacity, or he may have grown up amid surroundings which have dwarfed or stiffened him so that he can not receive much benefit. Such men or women should not waste their time in college. The writer makes this assertion feelingly, for a long procession of such failures passes before him, as he reviews his forty years of college teaching. Earnestness is no evidence of capacity; willingness to endure very serious inconvenience may be evidence only of willingness to follow lines of least resistance. Four years of self-denial at college may be far preferable to four years of hard work on the farm or in the shop. One may remark, parenthetically, that a vast amount of sympathy is wasted on men who work their way through college as though they were a superior type of the race. No man deserves any special credit for undergoing hardships in order to secure what he believes will yield great returns. The gold-hunters of the Klondyke did that and asked neither praise nor sympathy. The men who struggled to make their way through college and who proved in after life that they made that struggle with clear purpose for the future, ask no consideration and challenge the world to accept them for what they are worth. But our land is full of lawyers working as petty clerks, of physicians without practise, of clergymen whom no one wishes. They are embittered against the unappreciative world, which ignores the struggles they made to secure an "education" and insists on taking them at its own valuation. Had it not been for cheap tuition, college canvassers and boards of aid, a very large proportion of these men would not have gone to college and might have led a comfortable existence in some occupation for which they were fitted.

In all frankness, one must concede that the college of to-day does not fit a man for anything—it does not even train him to do clear thinking for himself. In early days, the curriculum was utilitarian in the severest sense of the term. Latin and Greek were learned as languages