The difficulty of defining the purpose of an institution may arise either from doubt as to its having any purpose, or from doubt as to which of its many purposes is of paramount importance. The difficulty of finding any satisfactory formula for the value of a college education is due to the latter rather than to the former of these doubts. One does not need in these days to argue that it is a good thing to go to college. The average American youth and his average parents have come to feel that college is an indispensable part of the preparation for life, or that the burden of proof rests upon him who would argue against it rather than upon him who would argue for it. But just what benefit should be expected it is not easy to say, because so much is expected. Similarly the average college graduate scarcely knows how to say just what he owes to his college education for the reason that he owes so much.

Replies have recently been received to a circular letter sent out by President Penniman of the University of Pennsylvania, in which the following question was propounded: "In the light of your career since graduating, what in your college education appears now to have been of greatest value to you?" The replies comprise an almost limitless variety of benefits,--such as "training in Investigating a subject", "mental, moral, and physical a training", 'contact with faculty members and students", "studious and orderly habits of thought", "knowledge of human nature", "responsibility", "general culture", "general orientation of the different branches of knowledge", "labor, determination, patience, courage, and independence of thought", "intellectual awakening", "the advantage of spending four years in a thoroughly democratic society", "the knowledge that the qualities of honesty, courage, chivalry, courtesy, and sportsmanship are the standards essential to self-respect and the respect of the other members of the community in which one lives," "the whole blend of intellectual and social influence."

What is the answer? What can be learned from this bewildering variety of testimony for the guidance of educational policy? One thing seems to stand out clearly. The period of college life is the period in which the plasticity of youth and the maturity of manhood overlap. All influences received during this period are likely to be profound and lasting. Since his college life is almost his only life during these years, and since a student attends college not only with his mind, but with his body and his soul as well, the college touches him at every point, and is the chief moulding force during what are perhaps the most crucial years of his history.

Such is the grave responsibility assumed by the English and American residential college, as distinguished from the Continental university. So long as this is the case, the American college has to be conceived not only as an agency for instruction and the promotion of learning, but as a general environment and organization of life. Its problem is two-fold: on the one hand, how may the mind be most profoundly awakened and most richly nourished? On the other hand, how may the conditions of life and forms of human association, for youth in the late teens and early twenties, be made most healthful and invigorating, physically, morally, and socially? Harvard Alumni Bulletin.