The Columbian. [volume] (Bloomsburg, Pa.) 1866-1910, 1907-02-14
LESS COLLEGE TUTORING.
One soure Of Income for Clever Stu
dents Cut Off BY New Conditions.

dents Cut on by New Conditions.
Private tutoring no longer yields
the rich harvest of former times to
clever students in the universities and
colleges of this town. says the New
York Sun. The palmy days of the
business vanished ten or fifteen years
ago, when a student working his way
through college could still earn from
$1,000 and $500 a year, and when
some men earned nearly twice .ue
latter gum.
Even then. however. the business
was not such science as the
"Widow" makes of it at Harvard. You
may learn almost anything Of the
Widow that is taught in the univer-
sity, and there are undergraduates
who fervently believe that he (for the
Widow is not a woman) knows more
fessors.
The Widows neatly written typo
written lecture notes, the Widows
careful summaries of the matter as
signed for collateral reading, are regu-
larly served out day after day to those
students that can afford to pay the
Widows prices. 1t costs good deal
more to get the Widows lecture notes
and other aids to scholarship than the
fees of the university.
Columbia and the University of the
City of New York have no Widow.
There are hard working students who
still tutor undergraduates for pay, and
there are seasons when such students
neglect their own work in order that
they may put in twelve or fifteen
hours day with the lads whom
they are tutoring. but a good many
things have combined to spoil the
market in New York.
The preparatory schools, If they are
not doing their work better than tney
did 1t twenty years ago, are at least
directing 1t more strictly to the end
in view, that Of putting youths into
college. Conditions are fewer than
they used to be, and electives give q
| student a chance to discover soft
| things in the way of studies.
Even the summer tutoring of lads
who have failed in the June entrance
examinations is not the profitable
business it once was. There was a
time not so long ago when husky
young football players from the pre-
paratory schools gave up two-thirds
| of the summer holidays to studying
| against the autumn entrance exami-
! nations, and anxious friends of col
lege athletics urged them on to their
| distasteful tasks. Parents gladly
| paid from SO to S. an hour to the
men who thus carried dull or idle
| boys through their vacation studies.
Tutoring is not specially frowned
| upon at the universities and colleges
Of this city. Some of the professors
| themselves earned almost as much
as tutors in their college days as they
| now earn as heads of departments,
and then the business does not assume
its worst form here.
In those universities where tutoring
has been brought to such perfection
that the idle undergraduates with
money to spend can be reasonably
sure of passing his examinations with
out attending lectures regularly or
reading the books assigned, professors
| funk the fellows who are known to
be regular customers of the tutoring
mills. A lecturer at one university,
not in New York, confessed that when
he examined the typewriter notes of
one of his own lectures furnished to
student by tutoring mill he found
them fuller than the notes that he
was himself using, for the tutor had
put in side remarks and illustrations
that did not appear In the lecturers
notes.