Education: Who's Commencing?

June used to be the season when college seniors got off Pop's back and onto a payroll. But across the nation's campuses this year, the B.A. or the B.S. is mostly a ticket to further education. The great majority of seniors at top colleges—and close to a majority at scores of others—plan to study another one or two years, if not another three or four. June is bustin' out all over with graduate students.

Roughly 70% of Harvard's 1962 seniors are bound for immediate graduate study, against 54% in 1957. The rate is 67% at Princeton and 70% at Yale (where 8% of the class is headed for Harvard). The University of Michigan estimates 50%, Amherst 77% and the University of Chicago 80%. At Swarthmore, where 81% of men seniors will go on studying, 40% of the girls will follow. At least 40% goes for the girls at Smith and Radcliffe, up from about a fourth of them five years ago. The 1961 rate for Bryn Mawr girls was 58%, and this year it should be even higher. The University of California's Berkeley campus is so overwhelmed that it has yet to gather statistics. Says Graduate Dean Sanford S. Elberg: "We've had 70,000 inquiries about graduate study so far this year."

Devalued Bachelors. More than 300,000 graduate students now throng the 600 or so U.S. campuses that offer such study. "It was the high school diploma in 1900, the B.A. around 1940, and it looks now as if the M.A. or even the Ph.D. is the thing," says Harvard College's Director of Admissions Humphrey Doermann. Moreover, those who earn doctorates (currently about 11,000 a year) are in for even more of it. To keep up with fast-changing fields, some 22,000 to 25,000 Americans are now involved in the burgeoning world of "postdoctoral studies" to overhaul outdated degrees.

The collegians' urge to go on studying stems from all sorts of reasons, and staying in the academic womb is apparently the least of them. Beating the draft is no prime mover, either—although one Princeton cynic did remark last week, "I'm doing graduate work at my fiancée's school next year so I can marry her this summer and avoid the draft." But far more pervasive is the idea that the B.A. is neither sufficient as a guarantee of a good job—big-company recruiters increasingly demand M.A.s—nor as a certificate of intellectual satisfaction.

As knowledge grows more complex, grasping it requires more specialization. Colleges do their bit by making undergraduate work a mere appetizer for graduate study. "The more I learned about history at Smith," says one M.A.-bound senior, "the more I realized I didn't know." Adds Alan J. Stenger, a Michigan math major: "After a B.A. in math, you really don't have much except a solid background. It would be a shame not to use it." At Chicago, Sally Akan, who is headed for a Harvard M.A. in Chinese, remarks: "My interest lies in a field in which training at the bachelor's level is completely insufficient."