Fleeting Scholars

Dr. Walter Albert Jessup, 61-year-old president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,* believes that U. S. .colleges are too big and too bad. Each year, in his report for the Foundation, he offers fresh facts to prove his point. Last year he took colleges to task for buying tuba players with scholarships (TIME, Feb. 14, 1938). Last week Dr. Jessup led off the Foundation's 33rd annual report by giving the rough side of his tongue to another growing evil: tramp scholars.

"The medieval age," said he, "had its wandering scholar. We have our itinerant or fleeting scholar. Hundreds of thousands of these itinerant students move from college to college, each armed with his letter of credit." Dr. Jessup found that collegiate hoboism, once thought of as a shiftless, spendthrift, boomtime phenomenon, had in the past few years reached appalling proportions. Although it is commonly supposed that the typical college student enters as a freshman and emerges from the same college with a diploma four years later, actually today most students transfer or drop out before commencement day. Only one-third receive degrees in the college in which they started.

*Dr. Jessup was recently elected to a unique position, given a seat on Johns-Manville Corp.'s board of directors to represent the public.

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