Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/173

Rh There is one tendency in American education which it seems we may accept as established beyond cavil, viz., that for the future, the public high school will take the place of the old academy, as the institution in which the average boy will receive his training antecedent to entering college. In the days of our grandfathers, the prospective college student received his preparation for college either under the private instruction of his pastor, or in one of the academies of the time. In either case, the body of college-going boys was a highly selected one—a class who had both the tradition of the scholarly life and, to no small extent, the taste and opportunities to follow this tradition. Then, even more than now, the college turned out men whose future work was to be the ministry, law or medicine.

With the advent of the public high school and the growing tendency of colleges to accept its graduates for entrance to college courses, we should expect to find two or three changes in particular becoming manifest: First, we should expect to find the college-going students less selected along the lines of intellectual aptitudes and scholarly traditions; secondly, we should expect a greater scope of life employment among the college graduates; and thirdly, we should anticipate a natural advance in the age at which boys would go to college as a result of the above-named circumstances, with all that they imply. Now, our public school system is, for the most part, so constructed that the normal age for a boy to finish his high school course is in his nineteenth year, making his age of graduation from college between 22 years and 22 years, 11 months, inclusive.

From this point of view, it becomes important to examine our data with a view to finding out in how far these influences which would be expected to raise the age of graduation from college have been active over other conditions which have negatived them, or vice versa. Plate III. shows the percentage of students that actually graduated in all colleges under the age of 23 years, since 1850—the date at which the data for all our colleges become available. Comment is hardly necessary here. With the exception of decade 1860-69, which evidently shows the effects of the civil war, the trend has been unmistakably upwards. Even if we throw out the figures for 1900—which represent, as explained above, all the available data from the colleges that in 1890-99 furnished over 81 per cent, of all graduates—the trend is still unmistakably upwards.

Concerning the influences that have been instrumental in causing the marked rise in the median or average age of graduation in certain colleges in our list, it is not possible to speak with certainty for all. In the case of one or two, such as New York University and Bowdoin College, it would seem that the rise is due to an increase in the requirements for admission. In the case of certain other, pronouncedly