84 



mechanic arts, and to give more money without restriction would be to simi)ly 

 give further impetus in the wrong direction. 



R. n. Jesse, of Missouri. I feel compelled to emphatically dissent from much 

 that has been said on this subject. 



I take it that Congress knew what a college was just as well as we know 

 what a college is: that Congress said what it meant and meant what it said 

 when it established colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts. It is very true 

 that the standards of admission to college at that time were not what they are 

 to-day. But college meant as truly then as it does now an institution that is 

 leased ui)on secondary education. And if the colleges \Aere not up to their 

 present rank, the same is true of the secondary schools. The college was based 

 upon secondary education as truly in that day as it is now. In my opinion, to 

 use any portion of the money coming from the Federal Government, either 

 through the land-grant act of 18G2 or through the ai^propriation act of 1890, for 

 secondary education, is a misappropriation of Federal money. 



Any State that wants to do so may, out of the State treasury, appropriate 

 money for secondary education — that is to say, for the preparatory department of 

 its college of agriculture; but I think that any State which does that commits 

 a blunder. I say this with profound conviction. I want to give a little of 

 my own experience in Missouri. In 1891 there was no standard of admission 

 to any department of the University of Missouri. Any student could get in with 

 an application and a fee. We began to raise the standards of admission to all 

 departments of the university, until to-day there is no department that does not 

 demand for admission a first-class high school education. As we raised the 

 standards of the other departments we at first left the college of agriculture 

 behind. The faculty of the college of agriculture contended that the condition 

 of the rural communities in Missouri would not admit of any standards of 

 admission to that department. But in getting all the other departments to the 

 ])oint where they rested on the high school system I conceived the notion that 

 that department ought to go up too. It had a small attendance; everybody 

 seemed to avoid it who could get into any other department. The men who 

 came and failed to get into other departments dropped into the college of agri- 

 culture rather than go home again. It was a catch-all of the other departments, 

 but it did not catch enough to be respectable in numbers. I brought the ques- 

 tion before the faculty of agriculture. The whole faculty went against me 

 except one man. After debating the thing an appeal was taken to the board of 

 curators. I wrote to every prominent college of agriculture in the United 

 States, asking what they thought about the propriety of demanding high school 

 education for admission. I was greatly astonished and greatly pleased at the 

 unanimity of the answers, for almost without exception these colleges declared 

 that a good high school education ought to be demanded. 1 submitted those 

 letters to the board of curators, who, after carefully considering the matter, by 

 a unanimous vote decided that the college of agriculture should be raised to a 

 parity with the other departments of the university and that admission should 

 be based upon a high school education. The next fall the enrollment in the 

 college was far greater than it ever had been before, and it has been growing 

 steadily ever since. In the i>resent year the enrollment in the freshmen class 

 is exactly twice what it was a year ago. When we made the college of agri- 

 culture thoroughly respectable in its entrance requirements, men began to come 

 to it, and inen are now forsaking other departments to enroll in that of agri- 

 culture. 



Various devices have been employed for bridging the gap between the elemen- 

 tary schools and the college of agriculture. The most notable of those attempts 

 is the Minnesota experiment. In this case there is between the college and the 



