# Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/"And Some Must Work"

There was a letter in my mail this morning from a young boy just out of high school. He was desirous of going to college, and like many another man with high ambition, he was without money.
"Could you find for me?" he asked, "some position which would not interfere with my studies, and which would bring me in an income of not less than fifteen dollars a week?"
I was forced to write him that I could not; that almost any job which he might obtain would interfere with his studies, and that if he were to earn fifteen dollars a week, unless he were possessed of some specific trade or skill worth a high rate of remuneration, it would be only by working six hours a day or more, and such an amount of time given to outside labor would interfere very seriously with any one's studies.
There are a great many people who labor under the mistaken notion that it actually is helpful to a college student's scholarship for him to work. I have known parents who were quite able to meet their son's college expenses, but who refused to do so under the false impression that they were doing the boy a service by forcing him to earn his living. "It will make a man of him," they affirm. "It will teach him the value of a dollar." It may, but it will seldom if ever conduce to making him a good student, and that should be his object in going to college.
​President Lincoln in a note to Mayor Ramsey once wrote: "The lady bearer of this note says she has two sons who want to work. Set them at it if possible. Wanting work is so rare a want that it should be encouraged." A college officer in my position at the opening of the college year would not be inclined to agree with Mr. Lincoln, for half the correspondence which comes to my desk during the summer months has to do with men who either want to work, or who say they do, in order that they may defray their college expenses. There are so many of them that their correspondence becomes almost depressing at times, for I realize the disappointments and the difficulties which very many of these boys will encounter after they reach college, and their unfitness to do any definite work well.
"I have been out of high school three years," one young fellow writes, "and have not been able to save any money. I want, however, very much to go to college. Can you secure a place for me to work where I can earn my board and room and such extra money as I shall need for my other small expenses?" This man, who has given all his time to work for three years and who has done nothing more than live, expects easily to carry a college course which in itself requires most of a man's time to do justice to, and at the same time to earn his living on the side. I get many such letters from those who feel that earning one's living and going to college are in no way incompatible. So much has been written about the fellows who have started to college without a cent and who have later been valedictorians of their classes and ultimately President of the ​United States, or at least a member of his cabinet, that the average high school boy has little conception of what sacrifice and deprivation such a procedure involves; if he did understand he would nat so often undertake it, or he would do so after more careful deliberation.
The man who works his way through college seldom does so because he enjoys working nor, excepting in rare cases, because he has any interest in the particular line of work by which he earns his living. He works from necessity; his chief thought, commonly, is not centered upon the efficiency of his service nor the value of his work to his employer, but upon the amount of cold cash it is going to net him. Very few boys who are working their way through college are interested in the work they are doing for its own sake or for the personal development there is in it for them; they have little thought of perfecting their skill in such work; they are looking forward eagerly to the time when they may leave it and take up something they really have interest in. They are for that reason in many cases indifferent, inefficient, and expensvie help, who lack the joy and incentive of interest in their work.
During my own undergraduate days I earned my living as a compositor on the student paper. There was no enthusiasm in any of the "typos," as they were called, to perfect themselves in typesetting excepting as such perfection would lead to immediate financial returns, and no idea of going permanently into the printing business; type-setting was for them simply a makeshift. They were interested chiefly in getting a long "string" and in picking off the ​"fat" jobs from the hook. They were, of course, never annoyed if incidentally they helped in getting out a creditable paper, but that was merely a side issue; the main thing was the pay envelope. None of us would have given a moment to type-setting if a legacy had been left us, or if we could have cajoled a rich uncle into sending us a satisfactory monthly allowance; we worked because it was necessary to eat and to pay our room rent.
Too many people attempt to work their way through college. Many of our colleges to-day are overrun with students with no money, with only commonplace ability, and with little initiative and resourcefulness. It is only the exceptional man without money who should go to college. Many men say that they would not be able to save money if they went to work, but it is as easy to economize and to save money out of college as it is in, and) the commonplace student should either not go at all, or he should work and save money enough to allow him to devote the greater part of his time to his studies; otherwise he is likely to fail. The man who works his way too often makes a poor living, and gets little college credit; he might better stick to a good job and give up the thought of the higher education than half starve and finally flunk in college. The names of scores of boys occur to me as I write this sentence—boys of only mediocre ability—who tried the struggle and failed.
In a democratic institution where a large percentage of students work, the tendency is for even the man who is under no such necessity to try to add to his income. When a fellow's roommate is receiving ​a pay check every month, it seems to a good many men, even though they do not stand in need of the money, inexcusable not to do something. Sometimes the man who needs the money least is most skillful and clever in earning it. I have in mind two young men who were adept at salesmanship but who were quite able to meet all their college expenses. They constantly endangered their college work through the unreasonable amount of time they put in in their business enterprises. Their father, who was a shrewd, close-fisted business man, was extremely proud of their earnings, never realizing that in spending so much of their time in making a few dollars they were detracting very materially from the efficiency of their education.
Most of the things which have been written of boys without education, like Lincoln, who ultimately became President of the United States, or of fellows with only fifty cents in their pocket who got through college on their nerve and made Phi Beta Kappa, are romantic, but quite misleading. These things have been done (there are the immortal Garfield, and Daniel Webster, of course), and they are still being done by men of unusual mental and physical equipment, but they are not easy to do, and they are not always desirable to do. The men who accomplished these things did so in spite of their handicaps and not because of them.
I have known many a man who paid in privation and sacrifice more than his college training was worth; for he was so engrossed and his time so occupied in the struggle for existence that he lost the greater part of what he should have obtained from ​his college life and associations The memory of Allan comes to me as I write. He was at best mediocre intellectually, and socially he was completely untrained. It was his dogged stubborn persistence only that carried him through. He was like a bull dog which had taken hold and could not let go. He had little resourcefulness, little initiative, so that there was nothing open to him but the most menial physical tasks. He had few friends and he was often without sufficient food. He slept in a stable during more than half his life in college and did the dirty scullery work at a cheap untidy down-town restaurant for his meals. He reeked constantly of stable odors and of the heavy smells of frying food. His wretched life told on him physically and mentally; he grew hard, bitter, sullen. He felt, not wholly without reason, that every one was against him, that he was fighting alone and a losing fight. He got his degree, but he left college coarse, soured, repellant, ill-trained, without courage to fight longer and without hope for the future. He has not accomplished as much since he received his college degree as he might reasonably have been expected to do without education.
The boy who works his way through college, and by this I mean the student who gets no help from any other source excepting his own efforts, must first of all have concentration, for he will of necessity have less time to devote to his studies than have those fellows whose entire time is at their disposal. There is a pretty general idea that the man in college who does not earn a good part of his living is on the whole a loafer and a spendthrift, who has so many ​vacant hours at his disposal during the day that, unless he gets into some sort of deviltry or extravagance, he is likely to grow horribly bored. Quite the contrary is true; for the college course as now planned, if it is done well, will give any ordinary young fellow enough to occupy his time quite creditably. The man, then, who besides doing his college work has to earn his living, will need to give his whole time to it, should be able to accomplish more in the same length of time than the average fellow, and must be satisfied to have little leisure in which to read, or play, or develop social graces, or do as he likes.
A young fellow—strong and healthy looking—dropped in to see me one day this week. He was ambitious but broke. If he came to college, he must make his way. He had on hand scarcely more than enough money to pay his initial tuition and get his books. We went over his plans together, and I thought that perhaps he might try it. "There is one thing I did not tell you," he said just as he was ready to leave, "I have always been interested in athletics, and if I come to college, I shall want to play football."
I threw up my hands, for even playing football sometimes gives a man little enough time for his studies, but if a man plays football and earns his living, he has little time for sleep, and none for his studies. The athlete is lucky if he passes his courses with creditable grades; he can seldom give much thought or time to earning his living.
The boy who must work should be mature and strong, and by that I mean usually nineteen or ​twenty years of age. The burden is often too great for a young boy to assume, for such boys are often forced to live irregularly, and to keep irregular hours either to bring up their college work or to do their outside tasks. Not long ago a young fellow, still physically immature, called at my office to ask my advice. He had little energy, he said, and little interest in his work. He found it difficult, when he sat down to a task, to accomplish much. I discovered on inquiry that he was working for a physician. He was forced to sit up until midnight to do his college tasks, and he had to get up at four or at latest at five o'clock in the morning to accomplish the things necessary to hold his job with the doctor. He was, therefore, getting never more than five hours of sleep a day, and yet could not understand why he was so lacking in energy and ambition. I have always felt that it was a wise and thoughtful physician with whom he was living. This slender, growing boy was attempting an impossible task, and in addition to failing in it—for he did not carry his work—he was in a fair way permanently to injure his health.
The student worker should be resourceful and adaptable, able to fit in anywhere, and able to use his brain in his work. It is the man who first meets an unsolved condition or satisfies an unsatisfied want who makes good at earning a living. Last fall a young freshman came to my office to ask me if I had any knives or scissors lying about which needed sharpening. He carried with him in a neat leather case which resembled a Corona typewriter, with its traveling clothes on, a small emery wheel and some ​simple apparatus for repairing and sharpening tools. I had just been trying to hew a broken lead pencil into shape with an impossibly dull knife, so that his coming seemed like an angel's visit. I gathered up all the paraphernalia in the office which permitted of sharpening, and he went at it. They were in a few minutes in excellent condition, he collected a quarter, and I sent him over to my house to make the rest of my family happy. I kept my eye on him during the year, and was not surprised to find that he was making a good living during his leisure moments because he had had intelligence enough to meet an unsatisfied want.
Several years ago, before the business of pressing men's clothes and keeping them in condition had been taken up generally, one of our freshmen rented a room, bought the necessary apparatus, and agreed for one dollar a month to press a suit of clothes each week, and to call for the clothes and deliver them. It was at that time an innovation, and even with one or two assistants, he soon had more business than he could take care of. He had a business head, he kept his agreements, he did his work well, and he was soon one of the financially independent who could oversee his business and let some one else do the manual labor. I always had the assurance that he would get on wherever he went, and I have not been mistaken. He is successfully running a fruit farm down in Florida now, and last Christmas I had a pleasant note from him accompanied by a box of delicious grapefruit which caused my family to remember him kindly for many a morning.
The skilled laborer, the man who has a trade or a ​talent will get on more easily than other men. Last year a young sophomore found himself without money and without a job. He saw an advertisement in the college paper for a cook in one of the short order restaurants near the campus. He had helped his mother cook at home, he had had a month's experience cooking in a summer camp for boys; he had some nerve, so he applied for the place and got it. The best part of the story is that he gave satisfaction, earned his board, and made a respectable salary besides.
The undergraduate who last year at the University of Illinois made the most money of any one who was trying to earn his living, did so by writing songs. His poetic efforts were in no sense remarkable; in fact I am not sure but that the same thing might be said of most of those words and music which are ritiging in our ears most often as we go down the street, but what this young fellow wrote seemed to catch the popular ear, and he reaped the reward of his appeal. He had a certain talent that was not great, perhaps, but it was not common.
It is the man who lets his brains save his strength, who makes the most money. In fact it is most often the man who does not work at all physically but who uses his head to make his plans and who hires some less clever thinkers to take the hard knocks,—it is this sort of fellow who really earns his way through college most successfully. A wide awake junior last year made arrangements with a city wholesale house to take orders for butter. Early in the fall he made a preliminary canvass of all the fraternity houses and general student boarding clubs, ​and took their orders for the year. Each house is sent so many pounds a week directly from the city. There is no further ordering and no delivering by the student; all he has to do is to send out the monthly bills and make his collections. With little real work he has made considerably more than enough to pay his college expenses. When he gets through college he will have several hundred dollars to his credit in the bank with which to start business. "I could clear two thousand dollars a year at the work," he admitted to me, "if I wanted to give the time to it, but I don't believe in making too much."
I have said before that the man who must meet all of his expenses while doing his college work must be mature and physically strong. A young fellow past twenty-five, who graduated from one of our Middle West state universities last year illustrates my point. He had learned to operate a linotype machine and was beside this a physical giant. When he came to college he was put on a night shift in one of the local printing offices. He did his studying in the afternoon and in the evening; he did his full day's work in the printing office after seven o'clock in the evening, and he got on with from five to seven hours of sleep a day and incidentally earned eighty dollars a month throughout his college course. He had so much money in the bank when he finished that he was able to marry on the day of his graduation and set up housekeeping for himself. I should not, however, advise many people to try to duplicate his task, for very few undergraduates would have either the skill or the physical endurance to do the work that he did. With all his strength, too, he knew his limi​tations. His work, his studies, and sleep took up all his time. He had no recreation, no social pleasures, no real fun.
Fifty years ago when the farmer's son with an empty pocketbook and a desire for learning set out for college, he carried with him a bag of potatoes or a sack of corn meal upon which to subsist frugally while he toiled at his books. It is done differently to-day. A few years ago the sons of the families of two farmers with whom I am acquainted solved their financial difficulties and met their college expenses in an entirely individual manner. They borrowed a few of the family cows, drove them across the country, found a lodging place for themselves and their charges near the campus, and lived comfortably and independently during their college course by selling and delivering milk to boarding clubs mornings and evenings. When they left college they still had their original capital intact, and took it back home with them in as good condition, barring the wear and tear of four years of service, as when they came.
Barbers seem always in demand about a college community, though I have known but one to finish his course. Musicians usually find employment, especially if the college is situated in a country place, as ours is, where most of the recreation and amusement of the students they must themselves furnish. There is always a good deal of dancing—too much in fact many people say—connected with a large co-educational institution, and where there is dancing there must be music—ragtime or otherwise. At the University of Illinois most of the local orchestras are composed largely of students, and ​many of them are controlled or managed by student leaders. These men all belong to the musicians' union and receive the regular scale of wages, which is a pretty generous one, set by the union. Since most of the engagements of these orchestras come at the end of the week, the members often have a chance to play two evenings and one afternoon a week, and though the physical strain is a hard one, they find it possible to sleep up on Sunday and so be in fair shape for the regular scholastic work of the week. I have known a large number of fellows who in this way met all of their necessary expenses and a few who were able to make more than they really needed while carrying their college courses, but the number of these last is small.
The skillful salesman with a line of goods which the public wants or which it can with a minimum expenditure of energy be made to want, can get on well in college. Just the other day, as I was walking down the street, I encountered an energetic junior who seemed to be bent on some business enterprise.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm making a house to house canvass for the sale of neckties," was his reply.
"Making any money?"
"As much as I need."
But unfortunately there are not many natural or skillful salesmen, and when one has no natural talent in this direction, he had better wait for his season of practice until he is not in actual need of money. The experience gained in learning to sell things is valuable, but it sometimes costs more than it is worth if the embryo salesman is trying to earn ​his college expenses. The last thing I should advise the indigent undergraduate to do either during the college year or during the summer vacation is to take up salesmanship and especially to take up the selling of books, for unless he has peculiar talent in such work, he is likely to fail, the optimistic literature sent out by the publishers of subscription books to the contrary notwithstanding. Every spring there come to our institution, as I suppose to all other similar ones in the Middle West, representatives of the houses publishing subscription books who give their effort in securing the services of undergraduates to go out over the country during the summer to sell these wares. Some of the men who take up the work must succeed or the publishing houses would go out of business, but it is also a fact that many of those who take up the business do badly and give their time and energy very largely for experience.
The great majority of young fellows who are without money and who wish a college education are equally without talent or special skill. It is, however, very often the tales of what men with special talents have done that goad on the commonplace man and deceive him into the belief that he can do as well in earning a living as his better qualified classmate. When he finds that all that is open to him, all, indeed, that he is fitted for, is waiting table or washing dishes or taking care of furnaces at so much an hour, perhaps, the glamour of earning his way through college and graduating with money in the bank fades quickly. Money earned in this way, and this in actual fact is the common way, counts up's lowly and is a heavy drain upon the worker's time. ​The first thing a man should ask himself who is contemplating self-support in college is what special thing he can do that will help him to earn money readily.
I have always advised the ordinary man without Money and just out of high school to wait a while before entering college. Two or three years of work will give him more maturity and so fit him better to withstand the heavy strain of doing two difficult things at once, as he will have to do when he carries his college course and earns his living at the same time, and if he is any way nearly as economical before he enters college as he will need to be afterward, he will be able to save a considerable sum of money to tide him over the first few months in college when he is getting his bearings and finding out what he can best do. No man should enter college who has not money enough to take him through the first half year without his working, and it would be better if he had made arrangements for an entire year. I say this in spite of the fact that a good many fellows struggle through the year successfully without taking these precautions, and in spite of the fact that many people urge the high school graduate to go immediately to college whether he has money or not. It is be cause of the great number of men who fail utterly or who have so little time for their studies that they accomplish practically nothing, that I feel as I do.
The man who has to work his way through college should be as well dressed as possible. He ought not wherever he goes to advertise the fact that he is in financial straits. He will not need better clothes than other fellows, but he will have to give them more ​careful and constant attention, because he will often have to do work that is dirty and because he will have more temptations to carelessness in dress than many other men. Too many college men who are self-supporting divulge the fact to every one they meet by their generally woe-begone and run-down appearance. The four years which a man spends in college give him pretty confirmed habits of life, and these include certain habits of dress. If in college he wears sloppy untidy clothes, goes with his shoes unbrushed and his trousers covered with grease spots and bagging at the knees, it will be hard for him to develop habits of neatness and care in dress after he leaves college. He should have substantial, neat, well-made clothes that do not invite attention because they are of the latest extreme cut or because they are completely out of style, and he should give them regular care. He must do this because a working man subjects his clothes to harder service than do other men, and at the same time he must wear them longer and still have them look well.
A good deal has been said in one place or another of the social ostracism of those who are forced to be self-supporting in college. In so democratic an environment as a state university we are not likely to see much of that. I have not found in my own ex perience that it made any difference to a man's social standing whether he worked or not. There is not a social fraternity at the University of Illinois which does not have among its members men who must earn their living. Such men are not thought of less or more, nor should they be.
The man who is working his way is entitled to as ​much respect and consideration as other men; I have seldom been able to see that he is entitled to more than are other men who are doing their college duties well. Self-support in college is not a matter either for self-congratulation or self-humiliation. The man who has to work is not the subject for special sympathy or special favors. He ought not to ask or expect to be exempted from the duties which fall to all students; he should not be annoyed if his omissions and his irregularities are looked upon in the same light as are those of other students. The young fellow who expects the college authorities to grant him special privileges, who thinks himself entitled to a larger number of cuts, or to longer vacations than those normally granted by the college simply because he works, is lacking a little. It is the man who meets the conditions of life into which he goes without complaint and without asking for favor that has the right stuff in him.
There is a quite general feeling among those who have never given the subject any serious thought or study that the man who works his way through college is more likely than other men to succeed in later life. I do not believe this, and I should be very glad to believe it if the facts warranted it. Men go to college for the training of the mind. The very fact that the self-supporting undergraduate must spend hours each day in earning a living, keeps him from the very thing for which he is making his chief sacrifice, and takes away from the very preparation which is fitting him for success in after life. The man in college who meets the necessity for self-support cleverly and skillfully, who uses his brains to ​help feed him and clothe him, is no doubt permanently helped by this effort, but the number of self-supporting students who really do exhibit skill and finesse in their own support is very small. On the whole I believe that the future of students is injured rather than helped by their undergraduate labors for a living, and I should not find it hard to furnish many examples from real life to substantiate this statement. There are, of course, examples to the contrary, but these simply serve to prove the rule.
Two years ago, I sent out to all of our undergraduates, one-third of whom, perhaps, do something toward self-support, a letter of inquiry. I wished to get the opinion of the men who were working as to whether such work was helpful or otherwise to their studies. It is true that the perspective of the man himself is perhaps a little too close for him adequately to judge, but at least the answers were interesting.
To the question: "Do you think your studies suffered because of outside work?" thirty-nine per cent. of the students replied in the affirmative, and sixty-one per cent. replied in the negative. Fifty per cent. thought that every student should do at least a small amount of work. The reason given in nearly every case by the working students was the conventional assertion that the holding of a job teaches a man the value of a dollar. Other arguments in favor of working were that outside work compels concentration and study, teaches economy, regularity, self-control, self-reliance, and conservation of time. They said that the worker gains an acquaintance with the ways of man and the ways of the world. He avoids loafing and uses to advantage ​those hours which would otherwise be spent in idleness. A good job keeps a man from acquiring bad habits and inspires in him respect for democracy.
Those who took the opposite view alleged that col—lege is no place for earning a living. There is no time for the broader things of education if a man must earn his way, whether wholly or in part. The opinion of many of these fellows who have earned their living and who do not look with favor upon the practice, is that outside work deprives the student of the opportunity to engage in athletics, social and other college activities, and so keeps him from one of the most valuable experiences in college life. It often makes him conceited, over self-reliant and too much in love with his own accomplishments. He is likely to undervalue real culture because he has had no time to give either to understanding what it means or to acquiring it. The fact that students work outside results very often in the college graduate's being a craftsman rather than a broadly educated man. Most of the work done by students in college in their attempts to earn their living is not helpful to them later in the professions which they fill. It is injurious to their life work and detracts from their efficiency. The good which a man may normally expect to get out of four years of college is thus very much lessened. As one man says: "A fellow who has earned his living has most of the joy and all of the culture taken out of his college life."
My own observation of the men who work their way through college is that too many who are unqualified attempt the task. Many a boy pays too high a price for the education he receives. Men do not ​always realize what they are missing or how much their studies are suffering from their outside work. As I see it through the experience of thirty years of pretty active contact with the man who works his way, the fellow who can get an education in no other way should accept the situation bravely and not whine; he should neither be proud of it nor ashamed of it. The fellow who works his way when he need not do so or who simply wishes to show his independence, is foolish and not using his time to the best advantage; and the father who forces his son to earn his way when he could just as well furnish him the money, himself needs educating.