Dr. Meredith of Tufts and Jackson Colleges said yesterday that college failures are traceable to a deficient personality quotient, rather than to a lack of intelligence. Certainly the entrance examinations have weeded out a major portion of the intellectually unfit; the psychologic maladjustments quite common to the Freshman year are more often responsible for failure than stupidity. This is especially true at Harvard, a large college in a large city. Indifference may be a blessing to the strong, but it may prove Coventry to the first year student bewildered by the austerity and unapproachableness of the environment. And as physical condition has been shown to be involved in intellectual output, how much more concerned are the complex emotional factors which come into play at the impressionable age when a student is removed, often for the first time, from parental guidance and control.

The solution of this problem is complicated by the fact that many students afflicted with troubles which psychiatry might alleviate would be loath to confide their difficulties. The deans and the proctors provide a certain amount of assistance, but in so far as psychoanalysis has become a complex art--hardly a science as yet--it is impossible for a layman to be of more than a nominal; assistance in most cases. Yale and Tufts, and several of the women's colleges have experimented with a mental hygiene department, to which those men are referred who failed badly in examinations or for other reasons give cause for doubt as to their fitness for college. It seems a sensible notion. In any group of boys of college age there will naturally be a certain amount of emotional stress and strain--it is up to the College which is their parent for that interval to see what it can do to avoid the waste and failure which is incident thereto.