UNIVERSITY MEN

Evening Star, Issue 21689, 7 April 1934, Page 9

UNIVERSITY MEN

’ FIND NOTHING TO DO Hard experience lias taught us the evils of over-production in industry, ft is time ivo considered the evils attendant upon over-production in education, and asked oureslves very seriously whether the same economic laws do not apply (writes H. E. Wortham, in the London ‘Daily Telegraph’). Have we, in fact, too many Bachelors of Arts?

The numbers of young men and women of twenty-one or twenty-two today with university degrees who can find nothing to do is a tragic commentary on the facile theory that university elucation is one of those good things of which one cannot have too much. The Oxford B.A. who is pleased to get a job as secretary-typist for £2 a week, the young Cambridge B.A. (Mechanical Science Tripos) working at a filling station, are in almost enviable positions compared with hundreds of others.

Talk to anyone in authority, either in industry or commerce, and he will tell you that he is besieged by applications from university graduates. The great majority of such applicants have no special qualifications. Even those possessing high degrees in one or other of the scientific branches of study find that there are many more candidates than posts. Some of the clearer-sighted professors in our universities are alive to what is a grave and urgent matter. Not long since Professor Carr-Saunders, who occupies the chair of Social Science in Liverpool, and can thus talk as an expert on the question, called attention to the disastrous policy of turning out graduates who cannot he absorbed by by onr economic system. “ Universities,” he said, “ should be schools of professional training. What are young men of twenty-two or thereabout going to do if they are not, at that age, fitted to play some definite part?” . Closer inspection shows that while the universities are thus failing to produce the required typo of man or woman, or to co-ordinate their training with the needs of the social organisation under which wo live, they are turning out graduates in evergrowing numbers. Statistics, indeed, point to an increase that can hardly be described as anything else than 1920, which was thought at the time to be an exceptional year, owing to the fact that many young men had then returned from war to finish their education, there were 25,070 first degree students at the universities in Great Britain. Yet in 1929-30 the total had swelled to 36,046. . During the Edwardian era a moderate growth kept pace with the prosperity of the period. We are now presented with the paradox of a time of economic stress witnessing that inte of growth doubled, trebled, or even The increase of undergraduates at Oxford between 1901 and 1913 was a little over 17 per cent. . Between 1913 and 1932 the increase was nearly 70 per cent. And Oxford only tells the same story as every other university. . At Cambridge, for example, in 191.1 there were 1,178 first-year undergraduates. Immediately after the war the figure jumped to round about I,7UU, being then, as already said, quite reasonably explained as due to the exceptional circumstances of the time. But it has’ remained at this height ever In 1929 there were 1,772 freshmen at Cambridge, and oven the depression of 1931-32 only reduced the number to 1,749. THE YOUNGER UNIVERSITIES. An identical process of expansion has affected the provincial and Scottish universities. London find its affiliated colleges possessed in 1932 the spectacular number ot 13,351 students. At Glasgow in 1901 there were 2,059; in 1931 there were 5,026. Edinburgh shows a more modest expansion from 2,811 to 3,725. Little St. Andrew’s, under the same lively impulse, has grown from 415 to 799. In other times the products of Scottish universities have found their market in England and overseas. Now that we have so lavishly established universities south of the Tweed, the poor Scot undergraduate with the avidity for learning that makes linn ready to fill a menial post during the vacations—he has long been a _ stock character for novelist and playwright—is more than likely to remain wedded to his poverty. Let him think of Manchester University with 2,359 students; of Leeds, a university only since 1904, with its 1,510 students; of Bristol, not long since regarded as a very small brother by its fellow-universities, with 905 students. There is Reading, an eight years old university, which has no fewer that 626 full-time students, for whose teaching there is a tutorial staff of 104, plus others unmentioned by name in the university syllabus. Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool have all been endowed with universities since the year 1900. Exeter. Hull, and Leicester cherish the ambition of seeing their university colleges drop their second qualifying name. It may be magnificent; but is it good sense? _ This story of obvious oyer-nroduction would be serious enough if the “ vocational ” ’ courses demanded by Prof. Garr-Saunders formed the staple of instruction. There were too many barristers, for instance, in 1913, when it was calculated that the average income of those who had been called to the Bar amounted to no more than £9O. There is said to be less work to-day in the courts than there was then. Yet the numbers of those at Cambridge taking the Law Tripos, which is definitely meant as a training for future barristers and solicitors rose from 58 in 1913 to 90 in 1931. What are all these young men going to do? The Economics Tripos (which has at least a semi-vocational purpose) in 1913 contained the names of ten men who had satisfied the examiners in greater or less degree. In 1931 there were 116 in the lists of the same Tripos. _ Of these sixty-eight obtained an inglorious third class. I have often heard business men express distrust of economic science. Such doubts may be illiberal. I,cannot, however, conceive of even the most enlightened leader of industry or commerce being impressed by the qualifications of a young man whose knowledge of economics is only sufficient to place him in the third class. The Triposes, however, which lead nowhere in particular have become still more popular. Students in 1913 sitting for Part 1 of the Historical Tripos numbered 96. In 1931 they amounted to 186. The Class 111. list, again, as long —an ominous commentary on the intellectual abilities of the candidates. Mediaeval and Modern Languages attracted 30 undergraduates in the year 1913, and no fewer than 150 in 1931. WASTE OF BRITISH YOUTH. Two new honours schools which did not exist at Cambridge before the war have also proved popular, in spite of their possessing no claims at all to be vocational. The .English Tripos list of

1931 contained 76 names, and 31 students passed the Geographical Tripos. Throughout our universities there runs the same tale, in which the waste is not that of mere commodities, but of flesh and blood, of British youth in numberless cases so soon to find its ingenuous ambitious tarnished in the atmosphere of a world which it has not as yet learnt to serve.

There is a grim humour in the fact that our educationists have made this tremendous machine without really knowing what to do with it. “ The present age, prolific in universities, has scarcely as yet faced the question whether universities are to be judged by their idealism or by their utility.” So runs a dictum in the Year Book of Education, edited by Lord Eustace Percy, a former Conservative Minister ot Education. The layman would probably agree with Prof. Carr-Saunders that, anyhow, our universities have not followed the homely path of utility. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the provincial universities are providing that culture and breadth of outlook, are giving alimentation to that love of learning for its own sake, which can be conveniently summed up in. the single word—idealism. “ The heterogeneity of the elements (I quote from the same Year Book), the divergence of studies, the mixture of the sexes, the lack of a common life ■worthily embodied in milieu and academic habit, the tolerance of sectionalism, and the lack of corporate expression ” —these are all obstacles in the realisation of this idealism.

Some observers mark the growing strength of these anti-cultural forces even at Oxford. If our universities are neither ornamental nor useful, the thing is even worse indeed than one supposed, and it is time that Parliament, which gives an annual grant of a sum in the neighbourhood oi £2,000,000, looked into the whole question.