Student Loans

From Columbia's muliebral Barnard College last fortnight issued the annual report of famed Dean Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve. In part, she observed that it is "practically impossible for all except a very few unusual young women to attempt working their way for four years without serious injury to their health or academic standing or both. ... I have in mind an able and interesting girl who hitchhiked across country from the Pacific Coast a few years ago and started to work her way through Barnard. In spite of our efforts to aid her the strain had produced, by the time she graduated, permanent injury to her heart. ... As a general rule women do not earn as high salaries as men. Moreover, they look forward to marrying and are reluctant to load a debt on a young husband. A debt makes an unattractive sort of dowry. . . ." Dean Gildersleeve thus touched upon one phase of the scholarship and tuition loan problem which, present at all colleges, is being attacked from a new angle by a big new institution called the Lincoln Scholarship Fund. This Fund started functioning last week in Manhattan. Its campaign: to raise $1,120,000 to lend as tuition fees to "anyone, regardless of age, race, color or creed who can furnish proof of need and sincerity of purpose." Its founder: Jacob J. Vandever, onetime (1922) President of the New York Rotary Club, and active philanthropist who likes to dress up as "Father Knickerbocker" each year for the outing of the Broadway Association, booster organization. Associated with Founder Vandever on a national advisory committee are such varied figures as the Hon. Theodore Gilmore Bilbo, Governor of Mississippi; General Robert Lee Bullard, U. S. A. retired; James William Crabtree, Secretary of the National Education Association. Honorary Chairman of the Founders Committee is Mrs. Edward Everett Gann, Second Lady of the Land. From its donors the Lincoln Fund asks no capital gifts. It is stipulated that the contributions shall be returned to the benefactors or to their estates at the end of 30 years. To do this the Fund will issue non-interest-bearing debenture bonds.* A part of each donation will be deposited in the National City Bank so that the accruing compounded interest will assure the return of the original capital. Furthermore, the organization will insure the life of each beneficiary. Prospective loaners are re--assured that only 3% of student loans are defaulted, that money loaned to the Lin- coln Fund will be sent directly to the institution the student elects, that in helping to pay a student's fees, they are also helping many an impoverished institution. Sample requests for assistance approved by the Lincoln Fund: The Dean of a small Eastern college wants money to acquire a Ph. D. If he receives the degree he will be made President of another small Eastern college.

A blind student of journalism in the South wants money to pay for a reader.

For a check room boy in a Manhattan hotel sufficient fees will be loaned so that he may continue an education already advanced despite the difficulty of working 63 hours a week.

In a Chicago veterans' hospital there is a War-mangled soldier who will be loaned tuition fees to a school of aeronautical engineering.

To a Russian emigree and her son in New Brunswick, N. J.. will be sent $157 so that the son may complete an agricultural course at Rutgers College.

Educated Men

Two comments of last week suggested that formal education is becoming more and more a thing of value, but it should not end with a college degree.

P: Said Newton Diehl Baker, Wilsonian Secretary of War, trustee of Johns Hopkins University, returning to the U. S. after passing a week at an adult education conference at Cambridge: "What the nations of the world need are educated men. The great trouble with most men who have been educated is that they become uneducated just as soon as"they stop enquiring and investigating life and its problems for themselves."

P: More portentously spoke Dr. Walter Taylor Marvin, Dean of the Rutgers College of Arts & Sciences, to a group of some 200 New Jersey industrial executives, at New Brunswick, N. J. Said he: "Is applied science making democracy impossible? The solution of our problem rests with education. If democracy and its partnership of the ordinary man in the affairs of life are to be preserved, the ordinary man must be given at least that minimum of elementary information which will make him an intelligent on-looker and critic of the doings and decisions of the expert."

Mother Boakes

Last week, while most U. S. mothers of school children were happy in the thought that they would be partially relieved of their unruly moppets for the next nine months, a Mrs. Gertrude Boakes of Woodbury, N. J., clung stubbornly to her brood of seven, would not permit four of them who are of school age to attend the first day of school. She took them to a circus instead. Mrs. Boakes, a graduate of Temple University (Philadelphia) was once a schoolteacher herself. Her husband is an interior decorator. Only on rainy days does she venture to teach the young Boakeses academically. Says she: "My children learn just as much playing out in the open--going to circuses--as they do bent over books in a school room. They have more chance to observe things, they get a broader education, and it is better for their health." When a County Judge ordered some of the young Boakeses to school last Spring, examinations given them by the School Board are said to have showed their knowledge of "things" was inferior to that of less fortunate, more bookish children of their age.

* Andrew William Mellon, wishing to avoid publicity, lately purchased $100,000 worth of similar bonds to help the Chi Psi fraternity at Yale, to which his son Paul belongs, build a new chapter house.