and on the course of study. There is no magic in the name of college, and there is no gain in wrong subjects, work shirked, or in right subjects taken under wrong teachers. Studies, like other food, must be assimilated before they can help the system.
The great indictment of the college is its waste of the student's time; prescribed studies taken unwillingly; irrelevant studies taken to fill up, helpful studies taken under poor teachers, any kind of studies taken idly—all these have tended to discredit the college course. Four years is all too short for a liberal education, if every moment be utilized. Two years is all too long if they are spent in idleness and dissipation, or if tainted by the spirit of indifference.
The spirit of the college is more important than the time it takes. The college atmosphere should be a clean and wholesome one, full of impulses to action. It is good to breathe this air, and in doing so, it matters little whether one's studies be wholly professional, half professional, or directed towards ends of culture alone.
The practical evolution of this matter will be this: The medical school for the exceptional student will require a college course of science with physiology and chemistry as the leading subjects, other sciences, with German and French, being necessary factors. The state medical colleges and those of similar purposes will content themselves with a minimum of two years of college work, along semi-professional lines, the preparatory medical course.
In city colleges where the students live at home, traveling back and forth on street cars, a college atmosphere can not be developed. In these institutions, as a rule, the college work is perfunctory, its recitations being often regarded as a disagreeable interruption of social and athletic affairs. As a rule, higher education begins when a man leaves home to become part of a guild of scholars. The city college is merely a continued high school, and with both students and teachers there is a willingness to cut it as short as possible, so that the young men can 'get down to business.' In institutions of this type, the professional school forms a sharp contrast to the college in its stronger requirements and more serious purpose. In other types of college, it is the general student who does the best work. In many of them the professional departments are far inferior in tone and spirit to the general academic course.
It becomes, then, a question of the college itself, how long a student should stay in it. If the academic requirements are severe, just and honest, if the idler, the butterfly, the blockhead and the parasite are promptly dropped from the rolls, if the spirit of plain living and high thinking rules in the college, the student should stay there as long as he can, and if possible take part of his professional work under
