THE AGE OF COLLEGE GRADUATION. 169 



There is one tendency in American education which it seems we 

 may accept as established beyond cavil, viz., that for the future, the 

 public high school will take the place of the old academy, as the insti- 

 tution in which the average boy will receive his training antecedent 

 to entering college. In the days of our grandfathers, the prospective 

 college student received his preparation for college either under the 

 private instruction of his pastor, or in one of the academies of the 

 time. In either case, the body of college-going boys was a highly 

 selected one — a class who had both the tradition of the scholarly life 

 and, to no small extent, the taste and opportunities to follow this tradi- 

 tion. Then, even more than now, the college turned out men whose 

 future work was to be the ministry, law or medicine. 



With the advent of the public high school and the growing tendency 

 of colleges to accept its graduates for entrance to college courses, we 

 should expect to find two or three changes in particular becoming mani- 

 fest: First, we should expect to find the college-going students less 

 selected along the lines of intellectual aptitudes and scholarly tradi- 

 tions; secondly, we should expect a greater scope of life employment 

 among the college graduates; and thirdly, we should anticipate a nat- 

 ural advance in the age at which boys would go to college as a result 

 of the above-named circumstances, with all that they imply. Now, 

 our public school system is, for the most part, so constructed that the 

 normal age for a boy to finish his high school course is in his nine- 

 teenth year, making his age of graduation from college between 22 

 years and 22 years, 11 months, inclusive. 



From this point of view, it becomes important to examine our data 

 with a view to finding out in how far these influences which would be 

 expected to raise the age of graduation from college have been active 

 over other conditions which have negatived them, or vice versa. Plate 

 III. shows the percentage of students that actually graduated in all 

 colleges under the age of 23 years, since 1850 — the date at which the 

 data for all our colleges become available. Comment is hardly neces- 

 sary here. With the exception of decade 1860-69, which evidently 

 shows the effects of the civil war, the trend has been unmistakably 

 upwards. Even if we throw out the figures for 1900 — which repre- 

 sent, as explained above, all the available data from the colleges that 

 in 1890-99 furnished over 81 per cent, of all graduates — the trend is 

 still unmistakably upwards. 



Concerning the influences that have been instrumental in causing 

 the marked rise in the median or average age of graduation in certain 

 colleges in our list, it is not possible to speak with certainty for all. 

 In the case of one or two, such as New York University and Bowdoin 

 College, it would seem that the rise is due to an increase in the require- 

 ments for admission. In the case of certain other, pronouncedly 



