Bad Fad

If you want three different answers to the question--"What's education for?"--ask three different educators. But, by & large, the "liberal arts" colleges believe that education should be for general culture, not specific training. Even in the liberal arts colleges, however, the present-day undergraduates gravitate toward courses that look as if they would pay off quicker in the graduate world.

Princeton's President Harold W. Dodds recognizes the tendency in his own college, and he doesn't like it. In his annual report to the trustees this week, President Dodds deplored what he called "a flight from the humanities." Twenty-five years ago, 44% of Princeton students were registered in the humanities; now the proportion is only about half that (24%). A good many of the students now concentrating on political, social and economic problems would do better, he said, to mine some of "our rich resources in the humanities . . ." "Undergraduates, like most of us, are subject to fads," President Dodds added.

Going Up

Enrollments in U.S. colleges have hit an alltime high (2,408,327), the U.S. Office of Education reported. But ex-G.I.s are now increasingly in the minority (42%).

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