Excerpt from The Relation of Undergraduate to Post-Graduate Curricula: An Address Read Before the National Educational Association at Saratoga, July 12th, 1892
I presume that the immense changes which have been made in the curriculum of our American colleges during the past twenty years have been almost wholly without reference to post-graduate or professional courses properly so called.
These changes have for the most part consisted in the marked increase in the requirements demanded for admission to college, in the introduction of considerable numbers of new branches to the lists of subjects taught in the four undergraduate years, and in the adoption of more thorough and exacting methods of instruction in each branch. There has been, as a necessary consequence, a marked increase in the ratio of the teaching force to the number of students taught, and in the amount expended by the college for each degree earned in course. The average age at entrance to college has advanced two full years in the last quarter of a century. The opportunities for high attainment and the incentives thereto have been multiplied, and with this greater maturity on the part of the students there has come an elevation of the grade of scholarship, and an improvement in the tone and dignity of undergraduate college life.
The development of the free elective and of the group elective systems would have been inevitable as a result of the overcrowding of the roster. But other causes have contributed to produce the result. The gratifying advance in the status of the teaching profession has been closely connected with the reduction in the number of hours required per week from each instructor; and with the advance in professorial salaries attainable as the result of the greater wealth of colleges and of increasing competition for successful teachers. So long as the average college professor was overworked and underpaid to the extent that prevailed a score of years ago, his influence was necessarily restricted. It speaks eloquently for the force and devotion of our elder teachers that in spite of such grave disadvantages they raised so high the standard of their calling, and impressed so deeply upon their students and associates the lessons of their self-consecrated lives.
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