ce (or lack of experience) and knowledge of the industrial
world, past and present, possessed by the average American college
student is such that courses of that kind meet a great need.[19]

=Time to be given to economics in a college curriculum=

Teachers of economics today are doubtless attempting the impossible in
compressing the present "general course" into three hours for two
semesters. No other department of a university attempts to treat in
such a brief time so broad a subject, including both principles and
applications. Such a course was quite long enough in the days when all
economic instruction was given by gray-haired theologians, philosophers,
mathematicians, and linguists, dogmatically expounding the _pons asinorum_
of economics, and quizzing from a dusty textbook of foreign authorship.
But now the growing and vigorous tribe of specialized economic teachers is
bursting with information and illustrations. Moreover, the range of
economic topics and of economic interests has expanded wonderfully.

The resulting overcrowded condition of the general course is possibly
the main cause of the difficulties increasingly felt by teachers in
handling that course satisfactorily. As a part of a general college
curriculum "general economics" cannot be satisfactorily treated in
less than three hours a week for two years. The additional time should
not be spent in narrow specialization but rather in getting a broader
understanding of the subject through economic history and geography,
through observation and description of actual conditions, through a
greater use of problems and examples, and through more detailed, less
superficial study of the fundamental principles. As a part of sixteen
years of the whole educational scheme from primary grade to college
diploma such a course would claim but 2-1/2 per cent of the student's
whole time, while the subjects of English, mathematics, and foreign
linguistics each gets about 20 per cent, in the case even of students
who do not specialize in one of these branches.

Of the replies[20] from nearly three hundred colleges to the question
whether economics was required for graduation, about 55 per cent were in
the affirmative. Unfortunately the question was ambiguous, and the
replies apparently were understood to mean generally that it was
required in one or more curricula, not of all graduates (though in some
cases the question was probably taken in the other sense). It is
notewor