Their Relation to Higher Educational Finance
83
balance between them would be most beneficial. The extent to which the
community offers opportunity for self-help and the amount set aside for
scholarships and fellowships are of importance to the loan problem. When
the work available to the Student is scarce, more money is needed for
loans and more loans should be made. Those who would work and cannot
are excellent risks and, if conditions are such that Student work is scarce,
it is better to loan money to many of these students than to allow them to
leave the institution. If large amounts of money are set aside for unproductive
scholars and fellows who never return the money, a smaller
number of students are thereby being served than if these funds were
placed in revolving loans. An understanding of these various phases of
Student help is vital to an institution.
Self-Help
Self-help is the method used by many students to put themselves
through College and in some institutions as many as 80 per cent. of the
students finance themselves wholly or in part. It holds a very important
place in Student finance. However,
Most of the things which have been written of boys without education,
like Lincoln, who ultimately became President of the United States, or
fellows with only fifteen cents in their pockets who got through College on
their nerve and made Phi Beta Kappa are romantic, but quite misleading. 44
As to the advisability of self-help for students, authorities disagree.
Dr. Angell of Yale says:
It may be hard work and in some cases an undue strain—earning a
living and getting an education at the same time, but in the majority of
institutions a real taste of economic necessity is a spur to study. The youth
who must work his way through College cannot afford to waste time joyriding
and jazzing around. 45
On the other hand, the London Times Bducational Supplement takes
the opposite view:
In the American institutions where “working through” is more common
than in England there is beginning to arise a certain doubt about the desirability
of the plan., There is a growing conviction particularly in the
Eastern universities that this independence is bought at too great a price. 46
It is further argued by some that the function of a College or university
is to stimulate study; that anything which reduces the potential
amount of study (where there is not even partial Substitution in ways
of health or of zest) such as extra-curriculum activities in various spheres
of Student undertaking, deducts largely from scholastic achievement. All
44 T. A. Clark, “Discipline and the Derelicts”, p. 93.
45 Quoted in the Alaska Daily Empire, April 18, 1924.
46 “Poor Men at the Universities” quoted in School and Society, Dec. 22, 1923.
