. Many of them have not yet made up
their minds what they will do. The great majority of those who have made
up their minds are headed toward the law, medicine, the ministry, or
engineering. This is a great pity. Why should the teachers and counselors
of these young men encourage them in preparing themselves for professions
which are already over-crowded and which bid fair, within the next ten
years, to become still more seriously congested? Perhaps the professors do
not know these things. If so, a little common sense would suggest that it
is their business to find out. Nor would the truth be difficult to learn.

In "Increasing Home Efficiency," by Martha Brensley Bruere and Robert W.
Bruere, we read:

"We have pretty definitely grasped the idea that the labor market must be
organized, because it is for the social advantage that the trades should
be neither over-nor under-supplied with workers; but it seems to shock
people inexpressibly to think that the demand for ministers and teachers
and doctors should be put in the class with that for bricklayers and
plumbers. And yet the problem is quite as acute in the middle class as
among the wage-workers. Take the profession of medicine, for instance, a
calling of the social value of which there can be no question, and which
is largely recruited from the middle class. The introduction of the
Carnegie Foundation's Report on Medical Education says:

"'In a society constituted as are our Middle States, the interests of the
social order will he served best when the number of men entering a given
profession reaches and does not exceed a certain ratio.... For twenty-five
years past there has been an enormous over-production of medical
practitioners. This has been in absolute disregard of the public welfare.
Taking the United States as a whole, physicians are four or five times as
numerous in proportion to population as in older countries, like
Germany.... In a town of 2,000 people one will find in most of our States
from five to eight physicians, where two well-trained men could do the
work efficiently and make a competent livelihood. When, however, six or
eight physicians undertake to gain a living in a town which will support
only two, the whole plane of professional conduct is lowered in the
struggle which ensues, each man becomes intent upon his own practice,
public health and sanitation are neglected, and the ideals and standards
of the profession tend to demoralization.... It