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Throughout the land last week school children were buying pencil-boxes and book-straps, getting fitted with new shoes. School was about to begin once more. This year, estimated the Federal Office of Education, the school and college population would be 31,000,000--more than one-fourth the total population of the U. S. The number of children in school, it said, increases steadily. The school year, averaging 172 days of work, is ten days longer than it was in 1920. Soon colleges will open for some 1,500,000 students. Some phenomena of 1930 school & college openings:

P: Chicago's 13,000 schoolteachers, unpaid since last April, went back to work, wondered what they were to use for money. A waiting list of 2,000 was ready to snap at vacancies. The School Board owes the teachers $10,695,973, has no funds in sight. Taxes are due next month, but it is doubtful how much can be collected. It might be two years before the whole sum is raised. Destitute, desperate, many teachers have accepted "script." an I. O. U. from the city, cashable for much less than its face value. First day of registration, high school enrolment was 18,000 greater than last year. A factor: more grammar school graduates were going to high school rather than hunt for jobs.

P: In Manhattan, 300 persons daily--largest number in ten years--sought teaching positions. High-school registrations would be 10,000 above last year it was estimated.

P: The University of California (Berkeley, Calif.) reported that trade and vocational night schools in the vicinity were calling for more teachers than could be supplied. Immediately the University started a night course to train male & female vocational teachers for fulltime positions. Said Benjamin E. Mallary of the Division of Vocational Education: "Unemployment creates an interest among workers in self-improvement. . . . This situation is furthered also by the recent legislative act which requires unemployed minors of school age to attend classes."

P: "Intellectual unemployment" is increasing all over the world, said the final report of the International Student Service which wound up its tenth annual conference at Mt. Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass. (TIME, Sept. 14). The Service recommended that "an organized effort" be made to discourage business men and public officials from setting college education as criteria for employment. Instead of the present "overemphasis on purely intellectual occupations," let there be a "saner appreciation of the dignity of manual labor and other practical work." Universities should not lower their standards in order to maintain present enrolments.

P: Stockholders of Alexander Hamilton Institute, international business correspondence school which has lost money during the last year, brought suit in Manhattan to oust the present management, headed by Dean John Thomas Madden of the School of Commerce, Accounts & Finance of New York University.

P: The American Automobile Association warned motorists of the return of school children to the streets. It pointed out that the number of children killed by automobiles had increased by nearly 25% in the last eight years.* "In the vast army of children returning to school will be little ones of four, five and six years of age who for the first time are leaving the protection and safety of their homes to enter an entirely new world. There will be problems enough without that of the reckless driver."

P: "Keep the children in school!" was the warning three weeks ago of Frederick Cleveland Croxton, assistant to Generalissimo Walter Sherman Gifford in President Hoover's Unemployment Relief Organization (TIME, Sept. 7). Last week Senator Robert Ferdinand Wagner of New York pointed out that 1,000,000 children under 16 were estimated to be holding jobs, that in 1930 some 103,000 14-and-15-year-olds left school to work. "That is a condition which ought not to continue!"

P: The following institutions anticipated enrolments equal to or slightly greater than last year: Vassar, Smith, Wellesley. Dartmouth, New York University, Yale. Princeton, Stanford. The University of Chicago expected a larger freshman class than ever, planned to be "prudent" financially. Substantially increased enrolments were expected by Drew University, Madison N. J. (it inherited from $7,000,000 to $12,000,000 from Manhattan's landowning Wendel family last March--TIME, April 6), Duke (10% over last year), University of California, College of the City of New York, Cornell. Rutgers University reported a slight decrease. The Universities of Wisconsin and Washington expected many more job-seeking students.

P: In London, 3,000 school teachers planned to march from Thames Embankment to "soapbox corner" in Hyde Park, as a protest against the 15% cut in their salaries under the new budget (see p. 16). They were the first professional group so to demonstrate their discontent.

C. In San Luis Potosi, Mexico, unpaid public school teachers struck. Disliking substitutes, children walked out of classes, swore they would not return until their teachers were reinstated.

*In the same period, adult fatalities more than doubled.

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