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Show The Smaller Colleges. Recently a man ol wealth announced his intention of sending his daughter to a "freshwater" or a small college, lie was able to choose any college he might desire, so his selection of a smaller college was, therefore, regarded - as ; something rather unusual. The "freshwater" colleges are i -mall places, compared with some 200 to 1,000, their buildings md equipment often aren't as new or as spacious as one might 1 wish, and their instructors (like most other college profess-j. profess-j. ora) are woefully underpaid. As like as not, the only way the rest of the country ever hears of them is when one of them accidentally possesses a football team of unusual excellence and beats a Princeton, a j Cornell, a Michigan, or a Notre Dame. And we call them "freshwater colleges" and let it go at that. 1 But very, very often, when you look up a prominent man in "Who's Who," you'll find that he was St. Mary's '94, or) Beloit '01, or Swarthmore '88, or Carleton 'OG. ' Somehow, there's a tremendous percentage of these small i :olleges represented in "Who's Who." 1 Some years ago we Americans, as a nation, conceived the ; idea that to be valuable a thing must be large and wealthy: i' So we set great store by our big universities, with their 10,- 1 000 students apiece, and ignore the rest. And that's where j we make a great mistake. ! After all, what does a lad go to college for? Probably ; there are a dozen reasons ; but shouldn't the main purpose be to learn how to think, to train himself so that he is able to j form his own conclusions, to search for the truth? (! The smaller college, as a general thing, seems to offer a mure favorable atmosphere for all of this than the large one. ' This is true even though it usually has poorer professors than I; the large colleges. Distracting outside activities are apt to be fewer. Less ) hiss is made about the football team. There are fewer stu-I stu-I dent-owned automobiles. Dances and parties occupy a small-! small-! er place on the calendar. 1 The man from the small college probably won't be as snappy a dresser as the big university man. Perhaps he won't be as well up on the latest shows and the newest dances. 1 ' But taking it by and large, he may know just a little bit more and able to use gray matter in his brain. |