Short Cut

U.S. colleges took a step last week that they thought would enable them to weather World War II better than they did World War I. Instead of making things easier for their students, they decided to let them work harder.

In World War I most colleges encouraged students to enlist, made degree-getting easy by giving academic credit for military drill, even Army service. Now conditions are more favorable to college attendance: !) Selective Service has superseded the old hit-or-miss enlistment system; 2) the Navy, advertising for college men to be trained as officers, promised they could finish their course before going into service; 3) President Roosevelt himself has urged collegians to stay in school until called.

Nonetheless, University of Cincinnati's President Raymond Walters, semiofficial U.S. campus nose-counter, reported last fortnight that the draft and defense jobs had cut enrollment in 669 leading colleges an average of 9.16% this fall. Stirred by this statistic and the U.S. entry into the war, many colleges last week announced plans for speeding up a college education without watering its quality: > Yale, Harvard and Princeton jointly launched a scheme to cut their course from four to less than three years by staying in session all year round. All three will let freshmen start next June instead of in September (choosing their men early by means of April College Boards). For this group, freshman "year" will run roughly from June to February; sophomore, February to September; junior, September to June; senior, June to January. > Universities in the Midwest and on the Pacific Coast, which have long been on a year-round basis (four quarters a year, including a summer one), expect more students to enroll for four quarters instead of three. At University of Chicago, a student can take as many as eight courses a quarter, graduate in a year and a half. Last week Chicago's meteorology course, training weather experts for the Army and Navy air arms, went from a five-to six-day week. Chicago has also arranged to let draftees finish college by taking correspondence courses at half rates. > Northwestern has another speed-up plan (to be tried first in its School of Speech): it will admit exceptionally able high-school juniors, let them combine the high-school senior and college freshman years. By studying summers such students can get through high school and college in six years.

> Seventy-six medical schools, members of the Association of American Medical Colleges, announced that they would go on a twelve-month year beginning next July, give the full medical course in three years. Little affected by the draft, the medical schools took this step to speed up production of doctors, estimated they would turn out 5,000 extra ones in the next three years.

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