Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/172

168 Plates IV., V., VI. and VII. present the evolution of the individual colleges during the last five or six decades in the matter of concentration of the body of graduates into a few years. We may in a measure take the degree of this concentration as an indication of the homogeneity of the student body, and of the organization of the educational machinery that prepares the students for college. It will be noted that while there is the greatest difference in the degree to which the condensation has gone on in different colleges, there is, nevertheless, a distinct and uniform tendency towards this concentration, which must in every case be set down as a distinct advantage to the college. The ideal types may be said to be very nearly approximated by such curves as those of Yale, Plate VI., Adelbert and Dartmouth, Plate IV., and Alabama, Plate V. Such a curve as that of Dartmouth, which we may take as the type which all the other colleges more or less closely resemble, shows most clearly that the college has changed in sixty years from a place to which a young man might go for study at any age, to a place to which young men go as a matter of business, so to speak, and at a definite period of their life. In other words, the going to college has become a matter of social organization, with its very definite place in the life of the youth. The intermediate decades, which lack of space prevents our showing, present curves which show how gradually this change has come about. It seems, further, a safe conclusion to say that all the colleges that have not yet reached the high degree of concentration which some show are, nevertheless, distinctly destined to come to it, unless some unseen force changes their direction of development.

It should be noted, in passing, that an anomaly, such as the curve of Syracuse for 1850-59, is due to the small number of cases. There were but twenty-nine graduates in this decade.

Plate II. presents in graphic form the same facts that have been given in the tables. Division 'a' shows in the upper line, marked '1,' the average age of all graduates as presented in Table III., 'Average of Totals,' plus the data for decade 1900, so far as available, also referred to above. The second line, marked '2,' gives the actual median age of all graduates considered as students of one college. It will be noted that, while the median has remained practically uniform throughout, the average has varied, but with no marked tendency either up or down.

Plate II. 'b' presents the same facts as 'a,' except the units of comparison are now colleges instead of individual students. While, as would be expected from the small number of cases, the fluctuations are greater than in the 'a' division, the same absence of pronounced trend in either direction is easily observable.