Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/292

288 another. These groups are ancient language, modern foreign language, history or social science and science. The remaining five units may be selected from any subjects offered by the high school for graduation, but no student is to be admitted to the university on less than the fifteen units required for entrance.

Under the plan that has been outlined by the University of Chicago, it is possible for the student to enter the university without mathematics, or, if he takes another combination under the second provision of the plan, to present his credits without languages, either ancient or modern; or, he may enter with modern languages, mathematics or history, and without ancient languages or science. This statement of the plan, however, does not complete it by any means, since the university adds two additional features, one relating to the observation and control of students, and the other to the continuance of certain lines of work. There has been established a grading system, which automatically eliminates the student who falls below grade, while the university maintains a statistical comparison of school and college records, so as to follow up the work of the high-school student, not only after he has entered college, but to bring the comparison with his record as a high-school student. To this a third feature is added, namely, a conference of high-school men. Having entered college, the student must pursue one of the subjects followed in the high school, and by the end of the second year must have completed two years in history and economics, two years of mathematics and science, and be able to read a foreign language; and if he comes up for a degree he must have spent three years of work in one department and two in another. You have under this plan a systematic attempt to coordinate the work of the high school and the college through the entire course of both.

An examination of the table of admission units required in the liberal arts colleges of state universities, shown below, indicates a stricter adherence to type and quite a marked tendency toward a hardening of lines in the establishment of certain prescribed studies for entrance to the colleges of state universities. Under ordinary circumstances one would expect a closer coordination between the state universities and the secondary schools than in the instance of the privately endowed schools and the high school. The explanation for the advanced stand of the University of Chicago is to be found partially in the fact that her officers have studied the school situation more carefully perhaps than have those of other institutions, and partially in the fact of her location in a city well endowed with high schools. In most of the states the universities are compelled to hold to the general conditions existing in those states, rather than follow the lines of development in the older and better established communities. Consequently, while the state universities attempt certain vocational subjects, the practise in this