Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/438

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
432
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

list was determined and then, by a complete tabulation of all the names in 'Who's Who,' the number from each college who found mention there, ascertained, i. e., the number of the rank and file—high-grade and low—who were high grade in the ultimate evaluation. These numbers are not given upon the table, but the percentage of such for each college is in column e. In the two columns, d and e, we have the basis of what seems to me an important comparison, the first representing the percentages of high-grade college men who were successful in life according to our criterion, and the second the percentage of good, bad and indifferent college men who achieved success in terms of the same criterion. The averages at the bottom of these columns are very expressive: 5.9 per cent, for the former to 2.1 per cent, for the latter. If we are to accept these figures, our conclusion must be that the Phi Beta Kappa man 's chances of success are nearly three times those of Ms classmates as a whole; that the upper stratum of college life is the upper stratum still when put to the test and, to borrow further from the nomenclature of the geologist, the cataclysm of graduation does not produce a subversion of strata. An examination of the table shows that for only five of the colleges studied was the percentage of success for