Sixty years later than the time of St. Ignatius there were 272 colleges, and in 150 years the collegiate and university houses of education numbered 769.
"Looking at these seven hundred institutions of secondary and superior education," says Father Thomas Hughes in his work on Loyola, "in their scope of legislative executive power we find they were not so much a plurality of institutions as a single one.
"If we look at the 92 colleges in France, although the University of Paris was in one quarter of the city, and in that sense materially one,—although including 50 colleges,—yet in the formal and essential bond these 92 Jesuit colleges were vastly more of a unit as an identical educational power than any faculty existing. No faculty at Paris, Rome, Salamanca, or Oxford ever preserved the control over its 50, 20, or 8 colleges that each Provincial exercised over his 10, 20, or 30 colleges, or the general of the Order over the 700 colleges, with 22,126 members in the Order."
At the present day we find the Jesuit colleges in almost every part of the known world. In Rome and in China, in South Africa and North America, in the Philippine Islands as well as in Ceylon and Egypt, in Australia and Cuba, as well as in Syria and the city of New York.
We may glance briefly at the colleges scattered over the world, containing to-day 52,692 Jesuit pupils.
This is a larger number than those taught at Oxford and Cambridge and Glasgow and Harvard or Yale or Princeton or in Paris and Edinburgh.
In the Jesuit College at Rome there are 2082 students.
Thus the total number of students—studying with professors of the Society of Jesus under one university system in all parts of the known world—is 52,692.