What is the Matter with the College

U NTIL quite recently the colleges and the scientific study of education have had little, if anything, to do with each other. In fact, the colleges have been unwilling to admit that education required scientific study. They have reluctantly admitted departments of education for the purpose of training elementaryand high-school teachers, but they have done this primarily because state departments of education require a given amount of professional training for the certification of teachers, and they must train teachers in order to hold their enrollments. But it has never been intended that these same departments or schools should turn a searching eye into their own programs, policies, and methods of instruction. All this is being changed. Something has happened to the colleges and universities. A veritable revolution is taking place in their cloistered halls. Many of them have resisted the social demands of a rapidly changing society. They have resisted so stubbornly that society has made up its mind to leave them to their scholasticism and create new institutions more in harmony with the demands of modern life. This movement has already gone so far that many students of the problem are freely predicting their demise, and such is the fate of many. Thus we might say in beginning to list the problems needing solution in the field of higher education that, for many institutions, a major problem is how to continue their existence. The leadership in these traditional liberal-arts institutions has been, and 1 A paper read during the dedication of the Graduate Education Building, University of Chicago

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