Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/13

Rh If professional schools are included in the computations, the figures take on a very different complexion. Thus at Michigan, for instance, in 1900 the law school with nearly 900 male students and the medical departments with over 600 served, together with the engineering school of 350, to keep the proportion of women to men in the whole institution within 3 per cent, of what it was in 1890, the figures being 16 per cent, and 19 per cent, for the beginning and end of the decade respectively. In almost every case the increase in the percentage of women occurred in the face of an unparalleled increase in the number of male students. Indeed, a recent writer has presented statistics to prove that the increase in the number of men in coeducational institutions has for some years past been relatively more rapid than the increase in the colleges for men alone. This, too, is a hard saying for those who maintain that women are driving men out of the coeducational institutions. But it does not mean, as we shall presently see, that women and men are increasing with equal rapidity in the same courses of study.

One finds his natural anticipations fulfilled in the almost entire absence of women from the courses in law and technology. Medicine attracts a small quota, but to all intents and purposes the serious embarrassments of the present situation may be treated as if the women were all segregated in the department of liberal arts. When one pursues the matter behind the face of the commonly published statistics, he finds that the process of segregation extends much further than these indicate. So far has the process of differentiation gone that certain courses are essentially preempted by women, whereas in others the men reign solitary and supreme. There is, to be sure, no rigid uniformity among the various institutions as regards the particular courses which are thus apportioned. But the phenomena of segregation is practically universal, so that in many glasses the spirit of coeducation is buried under the substance of a female seminary or a man's college, as the case may be. Thus it will be found that the classes in English literature have been largely appropriated by women. History, the modern languages and classical studies show in many institutions a large invasion of women, while mathematics, geology and biology, together with the philosophical and social sciences, furnish a transition to the exact sciences and to studies of an advanced character immediately preparatory for law, medicine and technology, in which the men have things almost to themselves. The distribution