Costs

Last week parents paid school term bills with a twinge at the expense and a wonder of their offsprings' futures. Teachers sighed over their final salary checks, for the study trip they could not afford. Alumni poured money into class funds, and school heads calculated how to ask for more.

Tuition. The most significant statement of the season was that of John D. Rockefeller Jr. He and his father have given more than a half billion dollars to general education, disease prevention and like social factors. They make no stint of their giving. Yet the younger John D. Rockefeller, at the 153rd commencement exercises of Brown University, his alma mater, last week forced himself to declare that the time is close when wealthy men will find themselves unable to keep up with the demands of education institutions for gifts.

It cost, according to U. S. Government figures for the academic year 1923-24, $140,000,000 to operate the schools of the nation. Of this student tuition and related fees paid less than half. A quarter came from endowments; another quarter from gifts.

In an older cultural organization this situation would have been logical and fair, Mr. Rockefeller pointed out. Schools, colleges especially, were then organized on the assumption that men would go "into the ministry, into teaching or engage in some other professional activity in which the financial returns to them would be small but the gain to the public large.... "Today, however, the majority of the students go to college for a good time, for social considerations or to fit themselves to earn money. The idea of service to the community is no longer the chief consideration. It would seem, therefore, that under these changed conditions the student might properly be expected to pay for the benefits he receives. . . . "For those students who could not meet these higher costs scholarships and student aid would need to be used with increasing liberality, and student loan funds provided on a large scale. For most students other than those who go into the ministry or teaching, a loan either with or without interest, with the first payment date possibly ten years after graduation, would meet the situation and not prove an undue burden. . . ." Contrasting with Mr. Rockefeller's talk at Brown University was the report, made public last week also, of Dean Huger W. Jervey of Columbia University Law School. Dean Jervey warned against raising tuition fees too high, said: "It means that, if we are not careful educational advantages will be open to the rich, rather than to the worthy. The only way to prevent the door being closed in the face of the man with brains and character, but without means, is establishment of scholarship aid." Endowments. John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s advice on educational costs however does not militate against his present donations of money. The General Education Fund, which he and his father long ago endowed, has $150,000,000 to be disbursed among proper educational organizations. Last week it gave $1,250,000 to Yale University School of Medicine. The money will provide a new building for work on public health, bacteriology, surgery and gynecology. Mr. Rockefeller was concerned with this gift only as a member of the Fund's board. His personal gift of the week was $100,000 to Newton Theological Seminary at Newton Center, Mass. President Everett Herrick of the seminary was in Providence last week; heard Mr. Rockefeller speak; received from President William Herbert Perry Faunce's own hands Brown University's Doctor of Divinity degree. Pay. President Henry Smith Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching made a report last week which penny-pinching school board members hastened to file away for future debate material. Stated President Pritchett: "There is a feeling among teachers that the problem of effective teaching is almost entirely a financial one, and that if teachers were paid sufficiently high salaries, there would be attracted to the teaching profession men of the highest ability who now are assumed to be drawn into banking, into industry, into corporation employment and into other callings in which large money rewards are sometimes to be had. "These assumptions contain certain misapprehensions. The man or woman who enters the calling of teaching ought clearly to face the fact that the rewards of a teacher's life lie in other directions than that of high pay or accumulated fortune." Primary Education. Costly as it may be to educate high school and college students, the yearly cost of teaching a pupil in U. S. schools averages very close to $57. In other countries, but under dissimilar conditions, the yearly pupil-cost (translated at present rates of exchange) has been:* Norway $63.70 Holland 60.40 New Zealand 58.70 Sweden 57.35 Denmark 54.86 England & Wales 54.84 Australia 53.97 Canada 52.46 Prussia 27.60 France 11.28 Italy 9.48

*Figures compiled by the London Times.