Take the special student problem. When a college or university is founded, it needs students: they are the life-blood of the institution. Really all that is needed to make a college is a teacher and some students: buildings are not indispensable, but students the school must have. Thus it is apt to keep its bars down and its entrance requirements flexible. Special students, often mature men and women, who are not prepared to pass the freshman examinations, are admitted on the recommendation of heads of d epartments, to special courses they are well fitted to take. Students are admitted freely, and then sifted out afterward, if they prove unworthy of their opportunity: not a bad method, by the way. A dozen years pass, and the institution wants to become respectable. It is just as with the individual: the man, at first, is absorbed in money-getting, and when he has it, yearns for respectability. Now getting respectable, for a college or university, is called "raising the standard of scholarship." Let this not be misunderstood: painstaking, infinitely laborious, accurate scholarship is a noble aim, well worth the consistent effort of a lifetime; but there are two sides to raising the standard of scholarship. Does an educational institution exist for the sake of its reputation, or to serve its constituency? If it seeks to advance its reputation at the expense of its fullest and best service to those who need its help, is it not recreant to its duty and opportunity? Well, in the mood cited, the institution raises and standardizes its entrance-requirements and generally excludes special students. One readily sees why: it is much easier to work with the regularly prepared freshman, he fits much more smoothly and comfortably into the machinery of the institution. Many a wise teacher will admit, nevertheless, that the best students he ever taught and the ones whose lives he is proudest of having influenced, were often men and women, thirty, forty, fifty years of age--teachers who suddenly realized that the ruts of their calling had become so deep they could no longer see over them, ministers awakening to the fact that they had given all their store and must get a new supply, business men aware of a call to another field of action-- working with a consistent earnestness the average fledgling freshman cannot imagine--he is not old enough; yet generally the tendency is to exclude such students, unless they will go back and do the arduous, and often for them useless, work of preparing to pass the examinations for entrance to the freshman class. That, too, is all wrong.