The Great Lakes College Plan

Abstract

T OWARD the end of the last century the colleges and universities of this country began adding to their curriculums, professional or, more likely, vocational courses in business. The natural tendency was to blend the practical with the classical, and as a newly acquired relative of Plato business administration remained within the liberal-arts college. Then, with the twentieth-century influx of thousands of youngsters into college halls, schools of business administration on the fouryear basis developed and matured. The four-year college of commerce had not been fully oriented into academic surroundings when it was decided that professional preparation for business could not be fully appreciated without first one year of work in the liberal arts, then two, and now, alas, without a baccalaureate degree in the arts and sciences. A few educators have seen in this trend a vain attempt to professionalize business, and many more have decried a philosophy of education that postpones a young man's entry into business until he is twentyfive or twenty-six years of age. Such a philosophy is most frequently defended on the grounds that prebusiness work provides the classical background so necessary for success in a business career and that it matures the student for his serious work in business administration. It is time that we question an educational formula that burdens institutions of higher learning with problems of elementary educational skills and graces. In other countries and here, too, in earlier times, the lower school assumed its responsibility of developing the abilities of reading and understanding, of computing and expressing, and of introducing its charges to the accomplishments and visions of the sciences and the arts. Now there are among us many who advocate extending the formal period of general education to the end of the sophomore year of college, to the exclusion therein of other studies. This is unconscious condonation of the inefficiencies of lower educational units and can, sequentially, lead to four and even more years devoted to the sole pursuit of basic educational aims and the development of social graces. Cognizant perhaps that an increasing age expectancy and temporary general unemployment have reduced the economic value of youngsters twenty and twenty-one for the present, they have advocated the permanent