This book is not the first that has been written about the activities and problems of former college students, but its scope and purpose are different from those of earlier reports. John R. Tunis, to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his 1911 Harvard graduating class, wrote a book describing the lives of his classmates,Was College Worth While?For many of them it was a turbulent history. No sooner had they established themselves in their chosen vocations when World War I broke around them. After the war many had to begin all over again; then when they were comfortably settled...

If a faculty, or a college, has decided that a knowledge of the activities, problems, and points of view of former students may help them to focus their teaching efforts upon the needs and adjustments that present students are likely to face out of school — if they have agreed, in other words, that the most valid test of the effectiveness of any school’s program is found not by reading catalogues or courses of study or listening to professors’ lectures but by examining the lives of men and women who have had contact with that program — then they are...

The young adults who received questionnaires ranged in age from twenty-three to forty-eight. Those who had entered the university in 1924-25 were on the average thirty-one years old; those who had entered in 1928-29, about twenty-seven. Ninety-five per cent of all these former students were between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four. It was five to thirteen years since they had entered college, and they had been out of school anywhere from one to twelve years. Most of them were, therefore, in the prime of young adulthood.

Although questionnaires were returned from individuals in nearly every state in the Union,...

In the preceding pages the entire group of young adults has been described in terms of twelve basic factors — age, residence, marital status, income, job satisfaction, occupational status, economic status, cultural status, general adjustment, morale, participation in leisure-time activities, and enjoyment of leisure. In the following pages these basic factors will be examined among different subdivisions of the group — graduates and nongraduates, those of high and low academic ability, groups with different residence, groups of different marital status, and groups in different occupations.

Except for the fact that all these young people attended college, they were not a...

The goals men live by, the responses they make in the face of difficulty and discouragement, the maturity of their reactions to personal and emotional problems, the extent and quality of their interests in art, music, literature, and other cultural activities — these are some of the intangible evidences of the effectiveness of higher education. All these evidences are grouped here under this chapter heading.

The section in the questionnaire on life satisfactions consisted of brief descriptions of twenty-six achievements that might be sources of much personal satisfaction. Each person was asked to check the five things that he believed...

That marriage, with its attendant home and family relationships, was regarded as important by these young adults is amply demonstrated by their own testimony, for 65 per cent of them listed “a happy married life” as an achievement that would give them the greatest satisfaction. In fact three of the five satisfactions most frequently desired were directly concerned with home and family relationships, the other two being “making a good home for your husband or wife” and “having children you can be proud of.” Furthermore the dominant desires for financial success, a comfortable and pleasant standard of living, and security...

Most men come to college because they think it will help them get a job that is better than, or different from, the kind of job they might otherwise get. Both reasons are legitimate because most university education is in fact vocational education, and courses of study are centered around preparation for an occupation—medicine, law, education, engineering, dentistry, nursing, dietetics, journalism, and so forth. The names of the colleges and departments within a university give evident proof that a good deal of higher education is devoted to preparation for jobs. The school of medicine trains doctors; the law school...

Effective citizenship and concern for the social good are broad educational objectives especially pertinent to and significant for the continued growth of American democracy. If large numbers of university graduates do not, as young adults, give evidence of responsible citizenship, democracy will suffer. If men and women who have been exposed to the teachings and experiences offered by free public education and have further extended their educational experiences to the college and university level do not emerge from such training prepared and willing to undertake the duties of citizenship, the schools must assume part of the responsibility for this failure....

Several clear-cut generalizations have been drawn in each of the four broad areas of adult living probed by the questionnaires and the interviews. A succinct and compact summary of these generalizations will serve as a starting point for this concluding chapter.

As we examined the personal life of these 951 young adults we said that the goals and life satisfactions that most of them had set for themselves were self-centered, focused chiefly on a desire for security and happiness at home and on the job. We found that they were not much concerned about philosophy or religion, and they were...