Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/537

Rh increasing his burden, so that the teaching ratio is raised from 17 to possibly 20 or more.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published, in May, 1908, the teaching ratios of 93 leading American educational institutions, deduced from data furnished by them. For example, this ratio is given for Johns Hopkins as 4.3; Haverford College, 6.5; Harvard, 8.8; Tulane, 9.5; Texas, 14.5; Drake University (Iowa), 25.7. For the 93 institutions the general average is found to be 11.9. Disregarding other considerations, the possible efficiency increases as the teaching ratio decreases. Since each student ordinarily has several subjects of study and thus multiplies the number of persons taught at a given time by each professor, an average of 50 in each class is allowable, this number being often greatly increased for lecture work and diminished for advanced class work. Experience has thus shown that for good college work the average teaching ratio should not much exceed a dozen, though lecture audiences may be limited only by the capacity of the audience room.

There are seven or eight American universities having each an annual income in excess of $1,000,000. Of those which are still willing to retain the more modest name of college considerably more than a dozen have incomes in excess of $100,000, and endowments in excess of $1,000,000. Nevertheless the assignment of $200,000 as a minimum productive endowment would cause the forfeiture of many charters. In early manhood the writers first teaching in an incorporated institution was in a "university" having a total endowment of $25,000. The connection was brief, and so was the life of the institution. The legislature that granted its charter was more obliging than well informed about educational standards.

A century ago such institutions as Harvard and Yale were almost without endowment and their annual budgets were nearly limited to the income from students' fees. But since the close of the civil war the growth of our country in wealth has produced unprecedented change in standards of all kinds. If the general standard of comfort in life rises with the prosperity of those in whose hands the greater part of the country's wealth is concentrated, the standard of college expenses may be expected to go up in like manner. Gifts have been showered upon institutions with favored surroundings and the ratio of total expenses to total attendance has been steadily rising. The college that has age, history and respectability without endowment is no longer sought by students who are prosperous enough to attend prosperous colleges, and its sad fate is not hard to predict.

With the growth of endowments and the enlarged scale of expenditure in all institutions of learning the student's tuition fee has been steadily becoming a smaller fraction of the cost of instruction given him. He generally pays less than half of what he costs. Every