Votes for 18?

Since 1935 a group of men and women in Washington has solemnly pondered the U. S. Youth Problem. This group (16 eminent persons headed by Owen D. Young) is the American Council on Education's American Youth Commission. It has spent its four years mainly in gathering facts and issuing reports such as its famed Youth Tell Their Story (TIME, June 6) on Youth's education, jobs, play, health, morals, mental attitude. Disheartened by such facts as an average two-year gap between school and job, the Commission has lately found fresh food for worry: increasing conflict between oldsters and youngsters, which is likely to divert to old age pensions public funds needed for Youth's education.

The Commission's statisticians reported that in 1850 there were 890 adults for each 1,000 youths (16 to 25), but today youth is outnumbered 2,200 to 1,000 and by 1960 it will be outnumbered 3,000 to 1,000. A Commission report* blamed this situation on a decline in "fertility among American women." Commission Member Dorothy Canfield Fisher dissented testily: "Why pick on the women? It takes two for that."

Last week the Commission began to look less sour. Having collected many facts, it was ready to start doing something about them. First step was to appoint a new director/- who has his own youth story. Floyd Wesley Reeves, born on a South Dakota ranch staked out by his father not far from Custer's last stand, spent his boyhood tending cattle instead of going to school. He went through Robinson's Complete Arithmetic by himself, read Tennyson. Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Horatio Alger, began to teach in a country school at 17. Three years later he went to high school, finished it in a year, then got a degree from Huron College in two and a half years.

He followed this with graduate work at Wisconsin and University of Chicago, where he coached football under Amos Alonzo Stagg. A Ph.D. thesis on Illinois school finance in 1924 started Floyd Reeves toward national renown. He made 400 surveys of school systems and colleges, became the No. 1 U. S. expert on college administration, directed a survey of University of Chicago, where he is still a professor, that shaped the Hutchins plan.

President Roosevelt took him from TVA, where he was personnel director for two years, to be chairman of his Advisory Committee on Education, which last year delivered a momentous report recommending Federal aid to education.

Today at 49 Floyd Reeves is wiry, quick, dynamic. Facing his new job--to help draft a plan for helping Youth and see that it is carried out--he complained last week that Youth's opportunities were narrower than when he was a boy, suggested that Youth be allowed to vote at 18 in order to reduce the electoral odds now favoring oldsters.

The American Youth Commission and Director Reeves believe that the Texas high-school youngsters who graduated last year with the slogan: "WPA, here we come," are not typical of U. S. Youth. They prefer to tell about the sandier college class which was told by its history professor that he planned to run for police commissioner of a university town but expected to be defeated by the city machine. The class went out and got him elected.

* EQUAL EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUTH--Newton Edwards--American Council on Education, Washington ($2).

/- To succeed Homer P. Rainey, recently elected president of University of Texas (TIME, Jan. 9).

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