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SCIENCE 



[isr. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 802 



courses which have a very distinct diploma 

 value in the catalogue and upon the statu- 

 tory plane of the college. We can never 

 expect real standardizing- of efficiency until 

 some body of men skilled in such matters 

 and experts in college affairs devise new 

 units of inteimal valuation applicable in the 

 most intricate affairs of the different planes 

 of the college ; or until these are all made 

 to work together for good by an adequate 

 administrative department. And as a cor- 

 ollary to this, it follows that if the present 

 college administi-ative system, so called, has 

 -utterly failed in handling the compara- 

 tively simple problems of the statutory 

 plane, much more will it be unable to 

 handle satisfactorily the further complica- 

 tions which must arise when the college 

 takes official cognizance of the home and 

 community life. 



To the educator and instructor this seems 

 chimerical and impossible of accomplish- 

 ment. On the other hand, to the business 

 man it seems impossible that our institu- 

 tions of higher learning should expect to 

 get adequate educational results, mental, 

 moral, religious and physical, out of their 

 $600,000,000 of capital, and $75,000,000 of 

 annual income, working through 30,000 

 instructors upon 300,000 individual stu- 

 dents, when there is no concerted study 

 looking toward a standardizing of effi- 

 ciency, and no units by which to value 

 their work except the A, B, C, D marking 

 system and the examinations for promo- 

 tion, which at best can apply only upon 

 one plane of the college economy. 



The Higher Education Association be- 

 lieves that in a fragmentary and discon- 

 nected way the material for the standard- 

 izing of the efficiency of the college already 

 exists and that the men who can assume 

 the charge of the new form of administra- 

 tion can be selected from college ranks. 

 One of the first tasks of the association will 



be to collect and collate the material al- 

 ready existing available for use in stand- 

 ardizing college efficiency, or for fonnula- 

 ting and defining new units of internal 

 educational and not merely statutory valu- 

 ations. At the same time it would put tags 

 upon the men who have already partly 

 solved these problems that they may be 

 available in applying the new methods. 



The Higher Education Association be- 

 lieves that a large proportion of the prob- 

 lems which are troubling the colleges are 

 not educational in their nature, but are 

 strictly administrative questions which 

 have arisen and have been solved under 

 like conditions in other human activities. 

 If so, these problems can be most quickly 

 and smoothly solved through the coopera- 

 tion of the alumni who have successfully 

 solved and are daily coping with similar 

 problems in their own business or profes- 

 sional life, and who are now trustees of 

 colleges or eligible for such positions. My 

 time will not allow me to give further par- 

 ticulars of how the Higher Education 

 Association proposes to bring the alumni 

 into line to help solve the extra-pedagogical 

 problems of the college. It believes that 

 these problems can be solved outside of the 

 colleges themselves ; that this work must be 

 done through an organization of the best 

 and best-known bankers, manufacturers, 

 business and professional men, among our 

 alumni, with its own corps of skilled edu- 

 cators and administrative and other ex- 

 perts ; that a new form of standardizing of 

 college efficiency which shall take account 

 of the educational values of the personal 

 equation of teftchers and taught must be 

 devised, and that a new kind of industrial 

 engineers for college affairs must be trained 

 and offered to the colleges. 



Clarence F. Birdseye 



1 LiBEBTT St., 



New Yoek City 



