k of our college students today are coming, the
bulk of the students in the endowed institutions of the East as well
as in the newer State universities of the West. The typical
undergraduate is no longer the son of a lawyer or a clergyman, with an
intellectual background behind him.

There is plenty of grumbling among college faculties, and in certain
newspapers, over this state of affairs. In reality, of course, it is
the opportunity of the American colleges. Let the motives be what they
may, the simple fact that so many American parents wish to give their
children more education than they themselves were blessed with is a
condition so favorable for those who believe that in the long run only
intelligence can keep our civilization on the path of real progress,
that one expects to hear congratulations instead of wails from the
college campuses.

Nevertheless, we pay for our opportunity, and we must expect to pay.
The thousands of intellectual immigrants, ill-supplied with means of
progress, indefinite of aim, unaware of their opportunities, who land
every September at the college gates, constitute a weighty burden, a
terrible responsibility. And the burden rests upon no one with more
crushing weight than upon the unfortunate teacher of composition. That
these entering immigrants cannot write well is a symptom of their
mental rawness. It is to be expected. But thanks to the methods of
slipshod, ambitious America, the schools have passed them on still
shaky in the first steps of accurate writing--spelling, punctuation,
sentence structure, and the use of words. Thanks to the failure of
America to demand thoroughness in anything but athletics and business,
they are blind to the need of thoroughness in expression. And thanks
to the inescapable difficulty of accurate writing, they resist the
attempt to make them thorough, with the youthful mind's instinctive
rebellion against work. Nevertheless, whatever the cost, they must
learn if they are to become educated in any practical and efficient
sense; the immigrants especially must learn, since they come from
environments where accurate expression has not been practiced--often
has not been needed--and go to a future where it will be required of
them. Not even the Do-Nothing school denies the necessity that the
undergraduate should learn to write well. But how?

=Solutions proposed by four types of instructors=

The Know-Nothing school proposes no ultimate solution and knows n