140 THE COLLEGE 



versity (over one fourth) enter the graduate school than is the case 

 elsewhere. 



For the past nineteen years I have acted as adviser to the students 

 who have studied at Bryn Mawr College, and I have been consulted 

 by them in their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. 

 If my experience proves anything at all, it proves that the first two 

 years, or the first three years, of a college course do not really count 

 as equal in value to one half, or three fourths, of four years, because 

 the junior and senior years are usually years of such intellectual 

 awakening, and furthermore that the senior year has a value far 

 greater than that of the other years. It is the culmination of the 

 whole college course, and a student who leaves college at the end of 

 three years suffers, it seems to me, incalculable loss. As the entrance 

 requirements of Bryn Mawr are at least as high as those of any 

 college in the United States, and as its college course, organized under 

 the group system, is really strenuous and difficult, and as girls are 

 supposed to be more mature than boys of like age, and admittedly 

 at present study more faithfully, my observations could not, I think, 

 have been made under more favorable conditions for the shortened 

 college course. 



Why, then, should this priceless senior year be omitted, or taken 

 in the law or medical school? Is it because those high in authority 

 have told us that boys are entering college from one to two years 

 older than in the past, and that, therefore, this lost year must be re- 

 covered? But four careful statistical studies of age on entering col- 

 lege have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that such statements are 

 not supported by fact, and that for the great majority of colleges the 

 median and average age of admission has not varied three months in 

 the past fifty years, the median age showing a net reduction of two 

 months in fifty years for all colleges, and the average age having 

 fallen one and one half months in the past forty years. 1 



1 President E. Benjamin Andrews, " Time and Age in Relation to the College 

 Curriculum," Educational Review, February, 1891, pp. 133-146. S. C. Bartleft, 

 " Shortening the College Course," Education, June, 1891, pp. 585-590. Professor 

 W. Scott Thomas, " Changes in the Age of Graduation," Popular Science Monthly. 

 June, 1903, pp. 159-171. (The arguments of above three papers are summarized 

 by Professor Elmer C. Brown in Addresses and Proceedings of the National 

 Educational Association, 1903, pp. 492-493.) Professor Henry P. Wright (Presi- 

 dent's Report, Yale University, 1901-1902, pp. 43-44, and 47-50) has shown that, 

 in spite of the very great gradual increase in the amount required for admission 

 the average age of Yale classes at graduation has increased less than four months 

 in the forty years from 1863 to 1902, and only nine months in the past eighty 

 years. In studying the age of admission during the past forty or fifty years, care 

 should be taken to consider only the statistics of those colleges which have main- 

 tained a genuine college course during this time, whose standards have developed 

 gradually, and not colleges situated in large cities that have developed from com- 

 paratively low-grade institutions into really high-grade colleges within the past 

 few years. For example, the age of graduation at New York University has 

 risen thirteen months in the past fifty years (see Popular Science Monthly, June, 

 1903, p. 160). Since 1860 the age of graduation at Columbia, and the work done, 

 have risen two whole years according to careful estimates, and according to actual 



