534 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



lege student is now the beneficiary of organized charity, and the self- 

 sustaining college is a thing of the past. The larger the number of 

 students the more unprofitable is the work pecuniarily, unless the 

 growth in attendance is accompanied by corresponding increase of 

 endowment to balance the excess of total annual cost over receipts from 

 tuition fees. In ordinary business the condition is reversed; the larger 

 the scale the greater are the profits possible. 



From the popular business standpoint the success of a college is 

 more readily measured by its number of students than by the quality 

 of its work. So urgent is the demand for numbers that it is not un- 

 common to see the need for increased equipment disregarded, the 

 library prevented from growing and remaining stuffed with out-of-date 

 rubbish ; and the professors overworked. As soon as the teaching ratio 

 exceeds a dozen the need for increasing the teaching force becomes 

 imperative. This can not be done if the endowment is too small to 

 permit the payment of living salaries to competent assistant professors. 

 The most ready resource is to impose the duty of teaching upon in- 

 experienced young holders of scholarships, or to grant the remission of 

 tuition fees to selected undergraduates on condition that they perform 

 the function of assistants in the laboratory, the library, or the office 

 of the language professor. If the efficiency of these undergraduate 

 assistants were proportionate to their pecuniary needs, or to their will- 

 ingness to do their best, such procedure might have some justification. 

 These undergraduate names are recorded, both in the register of stu- 

 dents and in the faculty list, and on dividing the number of students 

 by this nominally enlarged faculty number the alleged teaching ratio 

 is brought down so as to present the appearance of efficiency. The 

 public is misled and the college made to appear stronger than is 

 warranted by the facts. 



If objection is urged against what has just been set forth, the ready 

 reply is that the only way to impress the public and to attract bene- 

 factions is to grow rapidly and let the public know it. The resort to 

 cheap labor in employing inexperienced undergraduates for assistants, 

 and including them in calculating the published teaching ratio, is to be 

 regretted ; but it is locally deemed a less serious evil than any check in 

 the rate of growth, even if the endowment fund remains stationary. It 

 is urged that this course is necessitated by the sharpness of competition 

 for students; that catalogue statements must be interpreted liberally, 

 because competitors disregard their printed entrance requirements; 

 that many preparatory schools do not give four years of high-school 

 work, and hence the colleges must adapt themselves to this condition. 

 Some school principals reply that they are anxious to give the fourth 

 year of work, but can not retain their pupils because the colleges 

 admit these as special students; and articulation between school and 

 college, though most desirable, is thus impossible. The inevitable 



