GROWTH OF PRACTICAL EDUCATION
Dr. William R. Harper is quoted as saying shortly before his death that “no matter how liberally the private institution might be endowed, the heritage of the future, at least in the West, is to be the State university.” An ex-president of a State university has given the following indication of ten years of advance in attendance of students at fifteen State universities in comparison with attendance at fifteen representative Eastern colleges and universities:
| 1896-97 | 1906-07 | |
| State universities | 16,414 | 34,770 |
| Increase 112% | ||
| Eastern institutions | 18,331 | 28,631 |
| Increase 56% |
Almost any one of our great universities at present has many times the wealth, equipment, and students of all of our colleges fifty years ago. Our American agricultural and mechanical colleges, the greater number of which have arisen within ten years, now enroll more than 25,000 students. In 1850 there were only eight non-professional graduate students in the United States. In 1876, when Johns Hopkins opened, there were 400 such students. There are now at least 10,000 students of this class, and every year finds an additional number of our larger institutions including graduate courses preparing for practical vocations, with many of them adding facilities for graduate study during the summer.
The following more concrete comparison by Professor E. E. Slosson reveals the manner in which the new State institutions are rapidly meeting the demands of modern times for technical and professional education; for the chief progress in these institutions has been not in the old-fashioned culture studies, but in special departments, including well-nigh everything from engineering and dairying to music and ceramics:
| Total | Annual | Total | Average | |
| Annual | Appropriation | Instructing | Expenditure | |
| Institutions. | Income. | for Salaries | Staff in | for Instruction |
| of Instructing | University. | per Student. | ||
| Staff. | ||||
| Columbia University | $1,675,000 | $1,145,000 | 559 | $280 |
| Harvard University | 1,827,789 | 841,970 | 573 | 209 |
| University of Chicago | 1,304,000 | 699,000 | 291 | 137 |
| University of Michigan | 1,078,000 | 536,000 | 285 | 125 |
| Yale University | 1,088,921 | 524,577 | 365 | 158 |
| Cornell University | 1,082,513 | 510,931 | 507 | 140 |
| University of Illinois | 1,200,000 | 491,675 | 414 | 136 |
| University of Wisconsin | 998,634 | 489,810 | 297 | 157 |
| University of Pennsylvania | 589,226 | 433,311 | 375 | 117 |
| University of California | 844,000 | 408,000 | 350 | 136 |
| Stanford University | 850,000 | 365,000 | 136 | 230 |
| Princeton University | 442,232 | 308,650 | 163 | 235 |
| University of Minnesota | 515,000 | 263,000 | 303 | 66 |
| Johns Hopkins University | 311,870 | 211,013 | 172 | 324 |
WHAT IS THE CHIEF END OF AN AMERICAN COLLEGE?
This sudden and enormous advance in the pursuit of technical studies, which have made the State universities formidable rivals to our older, privately endowed institutions, has aroused uncertainty as to the real object of collegiate training. Modern commercialism, which has said that you must touch liberal studies, if at all, in a utilitarian way, has swept in a mighty current through our American universities. The undergraduate is feeling increasingly the pressure of the outside modern world—the world not of values, but of dollars. The sense of strain, of rush, and of anxiety which generally pervades our business, our public and our professional life, has pervaded the atmosphere in which men should be taught first of all to think and to grow.
The present tendency of students is to feel that any form of education that does not associate itself directly with some form of practical and significant action is artificial, unreal, and undesirable. Last winter I visited an institution on the Pacific coast where literary studies were considered, among certain classes of students, as not only unpractical, but almost unmanly. As a result of such drift in educational sentiment, the American undergraduate is in danger of getting prepared for an emergency rather than for life. He is losing,