June 4, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



891 



to the broadest attainable culture, in college 

 and afterwards, an ideal which is inspiring 

 and invigorating to any one who realizes its 

 meaning. 



We are here to-day to dedicate a building 

 to engineering education. In a deeper and 

 better sense, we are here to dedicate our- 

 selves to the highest and best use of the 

 great opportunity which the building rep- 

 resents, an opportunity to give an uplift 

 to the ideals and to increase the usefulness 

 of thousands of young men who are to 

 enter their life work through that building, 

 an opportunity to help in raising the stand- 

 ard of engineering education, an oppor- 

 tunity to help in making American univer- 

 sities of greatest real service to American 



John F. Hayford 



Northwestern University 



COMPARATIVE ENROLMENT OF STUDENTS 

 OF ENGINEERING 



It is g-enerally supposed that the attendance 

 on the engineering schools of our country con- 

 tinues to show the rapid gains that have 

 marked their development during the past ten 

 or fifteen years, and while at the majority of 

 the institutions the enrolment of to-day com- 

 pared with that of say five years ago would 

 exhibit a healthy increase, an analysis of the 

 accompanying table proves that a reaction is 

 apparently beginning to set in, at least at a 

 number of the institutions. It will be 

 seen from the table that the present total 

 attendance of engineering students at twenty- 

 four representative institutions shows an in- 

 crease over last year of only one hundred 

 and ninety-one students, or one of 1.15 per 

 cent. The figures given include students of 

 engineering, mining and metallurgy, and 

 chemistry, but are exclusive of students of 

 architecture (with one or two exceptions), 

 agriculture, forestry, biology, etc. It should 

 be noted that a number of institutions (for 

 example, the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 

 nology) have one or more of these last men- 

 tioned courses, and that the figures in the 

 table do not, therefore, represent in every case 



the total registration of the school. In some 

 instances (for example, Michigan) graduate 

 students are included, in others (for example, 

 Columbia) they are not; most of the institu- 

 tions submitted the spring registration, but 

 in a few cases the fall figures are given, and 

 there may be several other minor differences, 

 yet in spite of these discrepancies, the table 

 as given will convey a sufficiently accurate 

 idea of the most recent changes in engineering 

 attendance. Owing to the regulation requiring 

 a baccalaureate degree for admission to the 

 school of applied science, which has recently 

 become operative at Harvard, the figures 

 of this institution have been omitted, since a 

 comparison would be somewhat misleading. 

 Thirteen of the institutions exhibit a gain in 

 attendance over last year, while eleven show a 

 loss. It is interesting to note that of the 

 independent schools six show losses in attend- 

 ance as compared with last year, whereas only 

 five of the schools connected with universities 

 have experienced a decrease in enrolment since 

 1907-8, while eight schools connected with 

 universities and five independent schools show 



EuDOLP ToMBO, Jr. 



