“It is true that there is an increasing, and just now, an unusual
demand for college-bred men in all walks of life. The prescribed
preliminaries to legal and medical education are, step by step,
approaching graduation from college, and have reached it, in some
instances, while these professional courses themselves have been
extended and deepened, till they are now nearly or quite on a par with
the old liberal training with which they are co-ordinated in the modern
university. As to engineers,—fifteen years ago, the manufacturers of
machinery had to be coaxed to take those pioneers, the Cornell men,
into their shops and give them a chance. But where one went, many
followed. Last spring, when the class of 1900 came to graduation, every
student in this branch was eagerly bid for two or three times over. One
great electrical firm alone asked to be given the entire class. There
is observable, too, a gradual increase in the call for college-bred
teachers in the public schools, and this demand will grow by what it
feeds upon.
“All this is but the sign and symbol of an increasing complexity and
organization in our civilization. Rough-and-ready methods are going
out, and the untrained handy-man with them. In all directions, as
expanding American manufactures and commerce come into competition
with those of Europe, it is daily more obvious that the higher skill
and intelligence, making the closest use of its resources, will win.
Nowadays, to do the work of the world as the world will have it done,
and will pay for having it done, requires that a man be trained to
the exactitude of scientific methods, and that he be given the wide
mental outlook and the special training which he can acquire in the
university, and nowhere else.”