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A Study of Student Loans and 
ing the borrower with too great a load of responsibility in meeting the 
Obligation after graduation, it is encouraging to consider the vastly greater 
service over a restricted fund that the revolving fund will render worthy 
boys and girls throughout the country in their struggle for an education. 
This view of the business loan makes a strong appeal to the potential donor 
of a fund who wishes, quite naturally, to see a given amount serve a 
maximum degree of usefulness. There has come to be a general realiza- 
tion that the casual administration of Student aid is all too likely to have 
a bad effect on the Student who is allowed to slack in the payment of his 
first loan, and that the real responsibility for the resulting character dis- 
integration, however subtle, falls upon the group dispensing the assistance. 
In the creation and development of its unique theory and System of 
making loans to students, the Harmon Foundation has been working in 
virgin soil and has turned up and brought to light many curious facts, 
starting with the widely diverse attitude of educators and others toward 
the forms that Student aid should take, and ranging from a balanced judg- 
ment to pure sentimentalism. 
The unusual and unexpected has been found in the widely varied 
intellectual group of prospective borrowers, varying from the normal 
Standard to be expected of juniors, to a level very little above that of the 
grammar school. The uses to which borrowed money has been put have 
also been most curious, as well as many other qualities totally unexpected 
in a homogeneous group of College men and women. Nothing has been 
more marked than difference in the concept of Obligation which develops 
at the time repayment should begin. This ranges from a most admirable 
attitude, comparable to that of experienced business men, to utter child- 
ishness—a Situation which indicates that this side of education has been 
completely neglected among some, leaving many a young man in the 
kindergarten age as far as his knowledge of what is and will be expected 
of him by society is concerned. It is an arraignment of the influences, or 
lack of them, somewhere in the young man’s career—negligence perhaps— 
that makes progress unnecessarily difficult, and doubtless results in very 
many unnecessary wrecks of reputations. 
A single illustration is here given of the flippant attitude of a young 
man who had borrowed, completed his course, and received his degree. 
He had had a year in which to get a foothold, had received repeated 
requests to remit, and only when he was informed that the matter would 
be turned over for legal attention was the following letter received: 
If you know of any way to get money where it isn’t by legal process 
your attorney is a genius. I will pay as soon as I am able but I cannot do 
the impossible.