THE COLLEGE 143 



students pursuing college courses in the United States, and 49,076 

 students studying law, medicine, and theology, and of these only 

 7189 had received the bachelor's degree. Only two medical schools, 

 the Johns Hopkins and Harvard, and only two law schools, Harvard 

 and Columbia, now require a bachelor's degree for admission. It was 

 estimated by a special committee of the Board of Overseers of Har- 

 vard University that in 1890 only 8 per cent of the medical students, 

 18 per cent of the law students, and 23 per cent of the theological 

 students of the United States had received the bachelor's degree 

 (see Report, p. 12). In the law and medical schools of Yale, Colum- 

 bia, Pennsylvania, and Cornell, which, together with the purely 

 graduate schools of the Johns Hopkins and Harvard, may be as- 

 sumed to be the best-equipped and most advanced professional 

 schools of the East, the bachelors of arts and science did not average 

 31 per cent of the whole body of professional students in 1902 (see 

 President's Report, Harvard University, 1901-1902, p. 29). Only 11 

 per cent of college graduates of twenty-seven of the most advanced 

 colleges in the United States study theology (see Professor Francis 

 G. Peabody, " The Proportion of College-Trained Preachers," The 

 Forum, September, 1894, pp. 30-41). Clearly, then, the answer is 

 emphatically, No. The college course must not be impoverished in 

 the interests of a few thousand holders of the bachelor's degree 

 pursuing professional study, and forming scarcely 7 per cent of 

 the total number of college students, and not even one third of the 

 professional students, in the most advanced professional schools 

 in the East. Moreover, even as it is, these college graduates in 

 professional schools are not a year older than the non-college gradu- 

 ates in these same professional schools, according to the age-tables 

 of the Harvard Law School covering twenty years (see President's 

 Report, Harvard University, 1893-1904, p. 127). Yet most dis- 

 cussions on the length of the college course begin gravely with the 

 statement: " Since it is admitted by common consent that the 

 practice of the professions begins too late in life; therefore, the college 

 course must be shortened." But who has admitted it? Surely a 

 study of the whole subject affords us no reason for admitting it. 

 Quite the reverse. Before we repeat over like parrots such phrases 

 as this, let us investigate the actual conditions. For example, let 

 us first find out what the non-college graduates who form two 

 thirds of professional law students have done with the three years 

 during which the other one third are in college, and why they are only 

 a few months younger than college graduates in law schools. How 

 do we know that, if we shorten the college course in the interest of 







this college third, they will spend the year thus saved in the pro- 

 fessional schools? May not they also dissipate it like the two thirds 

 who do not go to college? 



