Who's Commencing?

June used to be the season when college seniors got off Pop's back and onto a payroll. But across the nation's campuses this year, the B.A. or the B.S. is mostly a ticket to further education. The great majority of seniors at top colleges--and close to a majority at scores of others--plan to study another one or two years, if not another three or four. June is bustin' out all over with graduate students.

Roughly 70% of Harvard's 1962 seniors are bound for immediate graduate study, against 54% in 1957. The rate is 67% at Princeton and 70% at Yale (where 8% of the class is headed for Harvard). The University of Michigan estimates 50%, Amherst 77% and the University of Chicago 80%. At Swarthmore, where 81% of men seniors will go on studying, 40% of the girls will follow. At least 40% goes for the girls at Smith and Radcliffe, up from about a fourth of them five years ago. The 1961 rate for Bryn Mawr girls was 58%, and this year it should be even higher. The University of California's Berkeley campus is so overwhelmed that it has yet to gather statistics. Says Graduate Dean Sanford S. Elberg: "We've had 70,000 inquiries about graduate study so far this year."

Devalued Bachelors. More than 300,000 graduate students now throng the 600 or so U.S. campuses that offer such study. "It was the high school diploma in 1900, the B.A. around 1940, and it looks now as if the M.A. or even the Ph.D. is the thing," says Harvard College's Director of Admissions Humphrey Doermann. Moreover, those who earn doctorates (currently about 11,000 a year) are in for even more of it. To keep up with fast-changing fields, some 22,000 to 25,000 Americans are now involved in the burgeoning world of "postdoctoral studies" to overhaul outdated degrees.

The collegians' urge to go on studying stems from all sorts of reasons, and staying in the academic womb is apparently the least of them. Beating the draft is no prime mover, either--although one Princeton cynic did remark last week, "I'm doing graduate work at my fiancee's school next year so I can marry her this summer and avoid the draft." But far more pervasive is the idea that the B.A. is neither sufficient as a guarantee of a good job--big-company recruiters increasingly demand M.A.s--nor as a certificate of intellectual satisfaction.

As knowledge grows more complex, grasping it requires more specialization. Colleges do their bit by making undergraduate work a mere appetizer for graduate study. "The more I learned about history at Smith," says one M.A.-bound senior, "the more I realized I didn't know." Adds Alan J. Stenger, a Michigan math major: "After a B.A. in math, you really don't have much except a solid background. It would be a shame not to use it." At Chicago, Sally Akan, who is headed for a Harvard M.A. in Chinese, remarks: "My interest lies in a field in which training at the bachelor's level is completely insufficient."

To Be a Professor. The speedup in good high schools adds to the pressure: youngsters are set on graduate school long before they get to college. At Amherst, for example, an estimated 90% of entering freshmen plan to study five years or more. Swarthmore's Mary Murphy is going on to law school because "I want to fill my obligation to society." At highly selective colleges, the idea of skipping further study is now almost square. Says Radcliffe's Dean of Instruction Kathleen O. Elliott: "I don't know how many times I've had to convince a girl that there is nothing significantly wrong with her if she doesn't go on to graduate school." One M.A.-bound senior rejoins: "If I had wanted just a four-year degree, I wouldn't have gone to Radcliffe."

For girls, a prime motive is recent publicity about the rising status of the U.S. teacher. And increasingly, even a beginning teacher needs an M.A.; New York State announced last week that after 1966 it will require five years of higher education for even grade-school teachers.

Something similar is working on men. "Teachers are a lot less maligned than businessmen in movies, books and plays," says one Harvard official. At Yale, in fact, the top scholars go to graduate schools of arts and sciences to become professors. Law tends to become the choice of Yale's B-students, and some of the best medical schools are complaining that not enough of the best students are applying.

Blondes & Fellowships. Scholarships explain much of the graduate binge. Not least is the "blonde scholarship"--a working wife. Now she is also likely to be studying in a marriage-by-degrees setup. Explains Marjorie McKintosh, a married Radcliffe senior who wants a Harvard Ph.D. in African history and anthropology: "I'll teach for a year while he goes to school. I'll go to school next year, and he'll be in school the year after."

Fellowships are plentiful, notably for science study (humanities are now also getting a break). At 139 universities in 1959-60, for example, private and Government stipends hit more than $35 million. As a result, some graduate students are doubtless doing better on the inside than they could on the outside. Instructorships paying $6,000 or so a year are common; a couple with two instructorships is in clover. In Palo Alto, one couple will move next month into a comfortable new house paid for mostly by a generous Stanford stipend. And hardly anyone can resist a "traveling fellowship"--the splendid European jaunt that so often produces scholars mainly versed in Vespas, Parisian girls, conversational Swedish, Oxbridge accents and appetites for paella.

According to one sardonic professor, the sole function of some graduate study is "aging students--rather like cheeses." Still, the trend in general has to be called a boon, not a boondoggle. Americans will just have to get used to a new June in which few collegians "commence." "I have no regrets about not going to work," says Harvard Senior Mark Mullin, 21, a star miler and government major, who will head for Oxford on a Marshall fellowship. "I knew right from the beginning of college that graduate school would be the thing. No, sir, the top jobs later on will open up for the guys with higher degrees."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.