June 28, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



991 



The proportion of men from outside the 

 state is, indeed, large in almost all the great 

 institutions that are not supported by taxa- 

 tion. Cornell, for example, gets 56 per 

 cent., and Oberlin only 50 per cent., of their 

 students from their own states, in spite of 

 the great size of the states of New York and 

 Ohio. This is true even of some of the 

 smaller colleges of this kind. Amherst and 

 Williams, for instance, receive from a single 

 state only 36 per cent, and 40 per cent, of 

 their students, the former drawing her 

 largest number from Massachusetts, the 

 latter from New York. 



I have spoken of all these institutions as 

 not supported by taxation, for among the 

 most valuable of the experiments in educa- 

 tion that we are trying in America, is that 

 of two classes of universities side by side, 

 striving for the same ends, doing the same 

 work, but supported and governed on a 

 radically different plan. All the best of 

 the state universities have outgrown the 

 stage when politics hampered their useful- 

 ness, and are now very close competitors of 

 the older institutions. The most flourish- 

 ing of them are in the central and western 

 states, but the line between the two classes 

 being by no means strictly geographical, I 

 shall refer to the institutions that are not 

 maintained and controlled by the state as 

 endowed universities. Not that the state 

 universities are wholly without endowment 

 from private generosity. Some of them 

 have received considerable sums in this 

 way, but as President Pritchett has pointed 

 out in the first bulletin of the Carnegie 

 Foundation, the most vigorous of the state 

 universities have been as a rule the ones 

 that have thrown themselves most com- 

 pletely upon the state and obtained the 

 smallest fraction of their support from pri- 

 vate benefaction. 



With state and endowed universities run- 

 ning a very close race, with their professors 

 constantly interchanging places, with little 



advantage on either side except what may 

 flow from the diflierent method of support 

 and government, one approaches with in- 

 terest a comparison between the two in any 

 field; and not least this question to what 

 extent they draw their students from afar. 

 We have seen that Yale, Princeton, Har- 

 vard, Cornell, Oberlin and even Amherst 

 and Williams, receive only from 25 per 

 cent, to 56 per cent, of their students from 

 any one state. Now Michigan appears to 

 be the only state university that attracts 

 any such proportion of her students from 

 outside the state to which she belongs. In 

 her case 54 per cent, of the students come 

 from her own borders ; while in the univer- 

 sities of Wisconsin (80 per cent.), Minne- 

 sota (89 per cent.), Illinois (83 per cent.), 

 Missouri (78 per cent.), Kansas (91 per 

 cent.) and California (91 per cent.), the 

 proportion that comes from the state itself 

 runs from 78 per cent, to 91 per cent. ; the 

 average for these six institutions being 85 

 per cent. The figures are certainly signifi- 

 cant. So far as they go they seem to show 

 that in the endowed universities, or at any 

 rate in several of the principal endowed 

 universities, less than one half of the stu- 

 dents come from any one state, but that in 

 the state universities four fifths, or more, 

 commonly come from the state itself. 



We should, no doubt, reach a similar 

 result if instead of inquiring how many 

 students came from a single state, we neg- 

 lected political divisions altogether, and 

 found how many came from a geographical 

 area or zone within a given distance from 

 each university; but to do so would nat- 

 urally involve a very elaborate investiga- 

 tion. The same object may, however, be 

 roughly attained by taking the percentage 

 of students who come from the six states 

 most largely represented in the university. 

 As a result of this computation we find 

 that Yale draws 24 per cent, of her stu- 

 dents from parts of the United States out- 



