144 THE COLLEGE 



And, surely, the college course should not be shortened because 

 of our graduate schools of philosophy. So few students are grad- 

 uated from these schools that they are a negligible quantity. In the 

 past five years, from 1898 to 1902, only 1566 men and women have 

 received the degree of Ph.D. from the thirty-four graduate schools 

 of the United States, and most of these graduates have been bribed 

 by scholarships and fellowships to take this degree. During these 

 five years over 54,900 bachelor's degrees have been conferred. 1 Also 

 the age-tables of the Harvard Ph.D.'s, kept during the past seven 

 years (see President's Report, Harvard University, 1902-1903, p. 

 139), prove that the greater number of Harvard Ph.D. graduates 

 (and presumably other Ph.D.'s) are twenty-eight years of age and 

 over, and do not, therefore, take up graduate study immediately 

 on graduation, and are not directly affected by the length of the 

 college course. 



Shall we shorten the college course because the college has proved 

 itself inefficient in the past? No, a thousand times, No! It has been 

 the glory of our past, the source of stability and sanity, the radiant 

 centre of all our gallant action and liberal thought. And since its 

 integrity has been so seriously threatened, we have become aware 

 by numerous statistical investigations that the college has also been 

 in the past the nursing mother of statesmen and men of affairs, and 

 the lavish bestower of fame and of all those social distinctions that 

 we long to receive at the hands of our fellow men. It has been 

 proved that although in the past only 1 per cent (the ratio is now 

 over 3 per cent) of American men have received a college educa- 

 tion, in the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Congresses, the House of 

 Representatives contained nearly 36 per cent and the Senate over 

 36.3 per cent of college-bred men, or thirty-two times as many as 

 might have been expected; that in the fifty-seven years, from 1841- 

 1898, 55 per cent of the Speakers, 55 per cent of all the elected Presi- 

 dents of the United States, and 54 per cent of all the Vice-Presidents 

 have been college graduates, and that 68 per cent of members of the 

 Supreme Court, and 85 per cent of the Chief Justices of the United 

 States have been college-bred men. 2 One out of 40 college graduates 

 as against 1 out of 10,000 non-college graduates are mentioned in 

 Appleton's Encylopedia of American Biography? In the 1900 edition 

 of Who 's Who in America, 1 in every 106 of the living graduates of 

 the colleges mentioned in Who J s Who has attained mention as against 



1 Pec reports of the United States Commissioner of Education. Science, August 

 19, 1904, states that in the past seven years, from 1898-1904, only 1713 Ph.D.'s 

 have lieen conferred. 



2 Professor John Carleton Jones, " Does College Education Pay? " The Forum, 

 November, 1898. 



3 President Charles F. Thwinjr, " The Preeminence of the College Graduate," 

 Within College Walls, pp. 15G-181. 



