Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/233

 the fathers of these men usually want their sons to finish a college course and get a degree, yet since not many of them have themselves had a college education they do not always feel strongly the importance of their son's finishing his work.

"My son does not have to have a college degree," the father of a twenty-year-old sophomore who wanted to quit college and get married, said to me this spring. "He's had two years of college. That's more than I ever had; and there's a good well-stocked farm waiting for him whenever he comes home." Why should a son like that stay out of agricultural affluence and matrimony in order to finish a college course? It were foolish, indeed. This financial state and general state of mind I am sure is not uncommon among parents, and I am convinced is responsible for the unfinished courses of a good many fraternity men.

A good many men, however, do leave college because of financial matters. It costs more to go to college than most people think it does. There has been an impression extant for a long time that one can live more cheaply in college than at any other place in the world. It is an error. It costs more to live in a college town than in a big city; and it costs a fraternity man more than it does a good many other men, because he lives better than they do. Some fraternity men have more