ON SCHOLARSHIPS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 419, 30 July 1928, Page 8

ON SCHOLARSHIPS

THE inclusion of agriculture among the subjects in which travelling scholarships are awarded is a suggestion that will shortly be placed before the New Zealand University Council .by the Education Department. The suggestion would be doubly useful if the department were to add a friendly hint that financial difficulties need not be regarded as insuperable. Nor should they be, for such a scholarship would offer a reasonable prospect of measurable and material return.

Massey College in the North and Lincoln in the South are both associated with the university, and it should be the university’s care to improve the value of the courses and the standard of the examinations. The awarding of a scholarship is an excellent incentive to individual endeavour. It is more important, however, to remember that every trained investigator who returns from the great centres of agricultural science brings back something worth money to a country that takes so much of its wealth out of, and off, the land. But obviously the worth of the scholarship depends on the scholar returning to New Zealand and using here the knowledge _he has gained overseas. The Lopes that the Dominion has placed in its Rhodes scholars have been almost entirely disappointed, because we have been unable to offer appointments in which their abilities would find proper scope and reward. Travelling and post-graduate scholars, too, have gone abroad, never to return. If the proposed new travelling scholarship is to be productive of results some means must be found of making it worth the scholar’s while to return to his homeland. Compulsory clauses will not do it. . ,