THE COLLEGE 139 



Our opponents ask us what there is sacred about the number four, 

 and remind us that some few early American colleges had a three 

 years' course, as have Oxford and Cambridge to-day. But our con- 

 ditions are wholly unlike those of colonial America, and Oxford 

 and Cambridge. In England, as in Germany, the would-be honor 

 student who goes up to Oxford and Cambridge from the great Eng- 

 lish public schools which are in themselves residential colleges in 

 our sense, giving the social and educational stamp of the American 

 college, and teaching far more of classics and mathematics than any 

 American high school or academy has everything to gain or lose in 

 his after-life, both financially and socially, from his success or failure 

 in the most rigid examinations the world has ever known. Perhaps 

 if in our American colleges we could select by the most strenuous 

 competition the best tutors and employ them at high salaries to 

 teach our college students in small groups of two, three, and four 

 students, and all our ablest students by themselves; and if we too 

 could make so much depend upon the grade obtained by these stu- 

 dents at the end of a three years' course of study in an examination 

 so rigorous and searching as to be without parallel in our educa- 

 tional system, w r e might be able to obtain as good results in three, 

 as in four years. But in Oxford and Cambridge, as in Germany, it 

 is only the " honor," not the " pass," men who attain this educa- 

 tion. The education of the average man is neglected. 



There is, of course, nothing sacred about a four years' course as such, 

 except in so far as the experience of seventy years has proved it to 

 be adapted to the needs of successive generations of college students. 

 The college department of the Johns Hopkins University is often re- 

 ferred to as an example of a three years' college course, but in reality 

 it is composed of the usual four college classes, the first-year students 

 being known as " candidates for matriculation," and a real freshman, 

 or preparatory, year being maintained under the name of a " class 

 for non-matriculants." The standard of admission to the three 

 years' college course has been set so high that since the opening of 

 the college, in 1876, this class of non-matriculates, or freshman, has 

 formed 21.5 per cent of the whole undergraduate body of students, 

 and in the year 1903-1904 these non-matriculates numbered 38, and 

 the matriculates 104; in other words, the non-matriculates were not 

 less than the number of freshman one would naturally expect in 

 an undergraduate college numbering 142 students. Moreover, the 

 undergraduate department of the Johns Hopkins University is so 

 small and unimportant as compared to its graduate school that, 

 even if the course of study were not practically a four years' course, 

 it could not be used to prove that a three years' college course will 

 satisfy the needs of the community, especially as an immensely greater 

 proportion of the graduates of the college of the Johns Hopkins Uni- 



