GRADUATE ENGINEERING

The desirable tendency to make engineering a subject for graduate schools, recently shown in the changes in the Harvard Engineering School, is evident, too, in the innovations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the first time the independence of the graduate school is recognized and it is given a separate administrative organization. The change, according to President Compton, is the result of the increasing emphasis on the graduate phase of engineering work.

Despite this change in emphasis, most men have no college training before entering the engineering schools. Yet the best professional schools of law and of medicine in the country have realized that students just out of high school can only get partial benefit from the advanced and highly specialized work they offer. They have seen that a liberal background before specialization is necessary to give a well-balanced life and to produce the most valuable social individual.

Engineering schools should frankly recognize this. They should require applicants, as do the law and medical schools, to have at least two years of preliminary college work, and preferably a degree. In this way Massachusetts Institute of Technology would be relieved of the task of orienting men into college methods, a job which obviously does not belong to the professional school. This change would obviate the present necessity of maintaining both a liberal arts and a scientific faculty. The liberal arts faculty which exists primarily to give a semblance of the cultural by its very incompatibility with the spirit of the rest of the school, cannot be the best. The scientific faculty, moreover, is deprived of the funds which might otherwise be used to make it of even higher caliber. In order for the Institute to perform its greatest service it should make engineering still more a graduate subject.