8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the women as regards the relative numbers pursuing the several 

 subjects offered by the curriculum, seem to be closely similar to that 

 obtaining in the courses in women's colleges, so far as statistics are 

 available and elective conditions comparable. It will be understood 

 of course that these rough classifications refer solely to elective work 

 taken in the broad sense, and not to such courses as are specifically 

 prescribed for every academic degree. 



One inevitably questions what this tendency means, what its final 

 outcome is to be, and whether it is to be regarded as a welcome sign or 

 not. It is clear, as regards the first point, that two influences are pre- 

 dominantly responsible for the general result. The first is found in 

 the disposition to mold collegiate work from the earliest possible 

 moment in such a manner as most effectively to assist in the prepara- 

 tion for a professional career. The second is found in the tendency 

 to cultivate established tastes and to foster spontaneous intellectual 

 interests. 



The efficacy of the first consideration in the case of men is not open 

 to doubt. In those parts of the country where collegiate coeducation is 

 the prevailing system, the great mass of the young men are expecting 

 immediately after graduation to enter upon a business or professional 

 career, and this intention frequently leads them early in their college 

 course to desert the humanities and the more purely cultural studies, 

 so called, in favor of what they, or the faculties of the professional 

 schools, consider the branches of immediately practical value. Litera- 

 ture and the classics rapidly surrender their claims upon these young 

 men to economics, political science, constitutional history, physics, 

 chemistry, biology, etc. In every large undergraduate body there is 

 naturally always a considerable group of men who conceive of their 

 educational opportunities in a more liberal manner than this, and 

 another group cherishing more or less definite intention of graduate 

 specialization in some of the departments of collegiate work other than 

 those allied with the professional schools. Taken together these groups 

 supply a considerable masculine leaven to what might otherwise in 

 many of the courses in the humanities be a hopelessly feminine lump. 



The women taken in mass are also widely controlled by professional 

 considerations. However it may be in the colleges exclusively for women, 

 there can be no reasonable question that up to the present time, at least, 

 large numbers of the women in coeducational institutions have been 

 looking forward to self-support. Or, at all events, if this were not an 

 explicit purpose in their collegiate course, it was a very comforting pos- 

 sible consequence, exercising an indirect influence over their selection 

 of studies. By common consent medicine and teaching are the two pro- 

 fessions really open to women. Consequently the average college wo- 



