On April 3, Harcourt, Brace & Co. will publish the first 25,000 copies of They Went To College, TIME'S book about the most influential body of people in the world: the U.S. college graduates.

TIME'S interest in the subject stems naturally from the fact that 77% of our subscribers are college-trained, and from the desire to know more about the group from which such a large segment of our readers is drawn. Naturally enough, we learned several things that concern the other 23% as well. Many college graduates, for instance, are convinced that their period of schooling could have been spent more profitably in gaining practical experience.

The book describes what has happened to 9,064 graduates of more than 1000 colleges, quoting generously from their letters, organizing the results of a detailed survey and presenting a mass biography of the whole group.

In They Went To College, all graduates will find a kind of portrait of themselves, and college students may get a glimpse of what is to come. The book will be especially valuable for parents who are trying to decide whether to send their children to college, or what kind of college to send them to. Educators will discover how their graduates made out, whether or not their former students would go to college or to the same college if they were starting again, and what they think is wrong with the colleges they attended and the courses they took.

A predecessor survey was conducted by TIME in 1940, and was published in 1941 as The U.S. College Graduate. The statistics we gathered then--on age, sex, earnings, family status and occupation--only served to whet our curiosity further about the nation's 2,700,000 graduates (4,700,000 by the time of our new study). We said then it was "a beginning to a larger continuing examination of the function of higher education in the workings of a democracy." After World War II, with enrollment of veterans swamping registrars, and with unprecedented numbers of our college-age population attending college, we felt the time had come to repeat the study.

In 1947 we asked college presidents what they wanted most to know about

their graduates. They sent in more than 800 suggestions, most of which boiled down to two main questions: 1) does a course designed specifically for job preparation help more in later life than a liberal arts education? and 2) to what extent are graduates participating in community affairs? After a committee of experts had framed questions to bring out the answers to these and other points, we prepared a 1 3-page questionnaire and mailed it to graduates from the octogenarian class of 1884 to the fledgling class of 1947. When I mentioned the project in this space four years ago, we had just begun the first rough compilation of results. We realized then that the really important statistical job of weighing one factor against another -- of correlating earnings with age, or with religion, for instance -- still lay ahead of us. To do that, we turned , all our figures over to Dr. Robert Merton of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Under his direction, Mrs. Patricia Salter West spent almost two years on this part of the study. Working with 90,640 I.B.M. cards, running and rerunning them through machines, she consolidated the information into a book which became her doctoral thesis.

Her findings were then turned over to Ernest Havemann, former TIME editor now with LIFE, whose often-demonstrated ability to "humanize" statistics made him a logical choice. While Havemann was writing the book, it was being checked, chapter by chapter, by Drs. Merton and West. Havemann had a field day, comparing the accepted myths (which he termed the "folklore") about college graduates with the facts revealed by the study.

Later on, I plan to tell you more about the book and its contents, the things that surprised us and those that verified our earlier opinions.

Cordially yours,

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