Abstract
IN a paper on the social distribution of university education which was given before the Royal Statistical Society on March 21 (J. Roy. Statist. Soc., 102, Part 3), Prof. Major Greenwood discusses the data of whole-time higher education, with particular reference to social class and such foreign experience as is available. Even with a stringent allowance for the difference of mean intellectual levels, it appears that under present conditions a large number of children of ability fit to profit from higher education do not receive it. Prof. Greenwood, however, concludes that the primary importance of university education, so far at least as concerns whole-time university education, is vocational, and as a matter of parental and governmental philosophy this fact is complacently accepted. On this philosophy no large increase of the whole-time university population should be expected. Data, however, about part-time higher education are incomplete, and the matter is of great importance, because increased leisure, which renders higher education possible for numbors greatly exceeding those before, is distributed through life, not concentrated in a few years of complete leisure. In commenting on the paper, Prof. A. M. Carr-Saunders pointed out that the number of those intellectually fit to profit from university education was very much larger than the number required to recruit the professions. He believed it should be the aim of the universities to bring under their care all who could profit fully from university education.
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Social Distribution of University Education. Nature 144, 591 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144591b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144591b0