THE COLLEGE 141 



We are told by these same special pleaders that in maturity and 

 acquirement the college student of to-day is two years above the 

 college student of thirty years ago. This statement does not admit 

 of the same disproof, but as the age of the college student of to-day 

 remains the same as thirty years ago, we may be permitted to doubt 

 it. Maturity and acquirement are more a matter of age than we 

 realize. Were it not for this it would be easy for American fitting- 

 schools to prepare boys and girls for the highest American college- 

 entrance requirements at seventeen, or even at sixteen, but the 

 majority of colleges do not wish such young students. Immaturity 

 of mind would make them undesirable. 



We have been told repeatedly in the course of this discussion that 

 college attendance in the United States was falling off, and that, 

 unless our colleges were to be deserted by students, we must shorten 

 the course in order to attract the sons of practical men. Again, 

 statistical investigation has proved this statement also mistaken. 

 On the contrary, practical men are sending their sons and daughters 

 to college in such overwhelming numbers that all our best colleges 

 are growing in students out of all proportion to the population. 1 



Recently a novel and equally fallacious argument has been brought 

 forward by President Eliot. We are told that the college course must 

 be shortened to three years because an examination of the marriage 

 statistics of a certain college for men shows that the children of 

 married graduates are not numerous enough (in the classes graduat- 

 ing from 1870 to 1879, for example, not over 1.95 children per Har- 

 vard father) to enable college men to reproduce themselves, and that 

 the children are so few because the four years' college course has unduly 

 delayed the beginning of professional and business life, and has 

 thereby prevented such men from marrying until so late in life that 

 their power of reproduction is limited presumably by old age. 

 It is almost needless to point out that before drawing any such far- 

 reaching conclusion in regard to the shortening of the college course 

 it would be necessary to know many other factors in each particular 



statistics the age of admission has risen one year between 1880 and 1902 (see 

 President's Report, Columbia University, 1902, p. 39). It is only recently that 

 colleges situated in cities have been able to maintain standards of admission and 

 class work such as the best-known New England colleges, Harvard, Yale, Am- 

 herst, etc., have maintained for the past five decades. 



1 Professor Arthur N. Comey, "The Growth of New England Colleges," Educa- 

 tional Review, March, 1891 ; and " Growth of the Colleges of the United States," 

 Educational Review, February, 1892. Mr. Talcott Williams, " The Future of the 

 College," Proceedings of the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools in 

 the Middle States and Maryland, 1894, and also " College Entrance Examina- 

 tions," Proceedings of the same association, 1896, an admirable statistical 

 paper, showing not only that college students have greatly increased, but that at 

 Amherst during the last fifty years the percentage of those students graduating 

 in each entering class has risen from 70 per cent to 72 per cent, and that at 

 Yale during the past thirty years the percentage has risen from 63 per cent 

 to 72 per cent. 



