538 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE DAILY TIME OF COKNELL 



STUDENTS. 



By Dr. GUY MONTROSE WHIPPLE, 



ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE AND ART OF EDUCATION, CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



FN the course of an address before the freshmen of Cornell University 

 -*- in the fall of 1903, President Schurman emphasized the necessity 

 of a systematic distribution of the daily time of college students and 

 urged each student to prepare and to follow as closely as possible a 

 daily time-schedule. He recommended the following general apportion- 

 ment of hours : for work, eleven ; for sleep, eight ; for amusement, one ; 

 for meals and athletics, two hours each. It should be added in ex- 

 planation that the period assigned to ' work ' was intended to include 

 not only time given directly to the work of the student in class-room, 

 laboratory and study, but also to work in various fraternal, religious 

 and collegiate societies, to work for self-support, or even to other work 

 wholly independent of the university. 



Without this explanation, which did not appear in the original 

 newspaper reports, the assignment of eleven hours daily to work nat- 

 urally seemed extreme, and it was not surprising that other educators, 

 when interviewed upon the subject, reduced this amount. Thus, Presi- 

 dent Eliot, of Harvard, advocated nine hours for work, three for meals, 

 tw T o each for amusement and athletics and eight for sleep. Still 

 others, as Professor Burton, dean of the Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, thought eight hours sufficient for work. 



In view of these differences of opinion, the writer conceived the 

 notion of trying to ascertain how the students at Cornell University 

 actually did distribute their daily time. 



On account of the wide range of courses offered, Cornell is an 

 unusually good field for such an investigation, as the students in the 

 various colleges: mechanical and civil engineering, law, medicine, 

 veterinary medicine, agriculture, and arts and sciences, may be fitly 

 compared with those of technical schools like the Institute of Tech- 

 nologjr, with those of various law, medical and agricultural schools, and 

 with those of any of the colleges offering the A.B. degree for a ' liberal 

 culture ' course, while the several hundred women students, mainly in 

 arts, may be compared with women at colleges like Vassar, Smith and 

 Wellesley. It was, accordingly, the purpose of the investigation not 

 only to ascertain the average time-schedule followed by Cornell stu- 

 dents as a whole, but, also, for purposes of comparison, that followed 

 by each of the various groups just mentioned. 





