COLLEGE STANDARDIZATION 533 



increasing his burden, so that the teaching ratio is raised from 17 to 

 possibly 20 or more. 



The Carnegie Foundation for the x^dvancement of Teaching pub- 

 lished, in May, 1908, the teaching ratios of 93 leading American educa- 

 tional institutions, deduced from data furnished by them. For example, 

 this ratio is given for Johns Hopkins as 4.3 ; Haverford College, 6.5 ; 

 Harvard, 8.8; Tulane, 9.5; Texas, 14.5; Drake University (Iowa), 

 25.7. For the 93 institutions the general average is found to be 11.9. 

 Disregarding other considerations, the possible efficiency increases as 

 the teaching ratio decreases. Since each student ordinarily has 

 several subjects of study and thus multiplies the number of persons 

 taught at a given time by each professor, an average of 50 in each 

 class is allowable, this number being often greatly increased for lecture 

 work and diminished for advanced class work. Experience has thus 

 shown that for good college work the average teaching ratio should 

 not much exceed a dozen, though lecture audiences may be limited 

 only by the capacity of the audience room. 



There are seven or eight American universities having each an 

 annual income in excess of $1,000,000. Of those which are still will- 

 ing to retain the more modest name of college considerably more than 

 a dozen have incomes in excess of $100,000, and endowments in excess 

 of $1,000,000. Nevertheless the assignment of $200,000 as a minimum 

 productive endowment would cause the forfeiture of many charters. 

 In early manhood the writers first teaching in an incorporated institu- 

 tion was in a " university " having a total endowment of $25,000. 

 The connection was brief, and so was the life of the institution. The 

 legislature that granted its charter was more obliging than well in- 

 formed about educational standards. 



A century ago such institutions as Harvard and Yale were almost 

 without endowment and their annual budgets were nearly limited to the 

 income from students' fees. But since the close of the civil war the 

 growth of our country in wealth has produced unprecedented change 

 in standards of all kinds. If the general standard of comfort in life 

 rises with the prosperity of those in whose hands the greater part of the 

 country's wealth is concentrated, the standard of college expenses may 

 be expected to go up in like manner. Gifts have been showered upon 

 institutions with favored surroundings and the ratio of total expenses 

 to total attendance has been steadily rising. The college that has age, 

 history and respectability without endowment is no longer sought by 

 students who are prosperous enough to attend prosperous colleges, and 

 its sad fate is not hard to predict. 



With the growth of endowments and the enlarged scale of expendi- 

 ture in all institutions of learning the student's tuition fee has been 

 steadily becoming a smaller fraction of the cost of instruction given 

 him. He generally pays less than half of what he costs. Every col- 



