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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/518

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514
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE

COLLEGE STUDIES AND PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

In The Educational Review for October, President Lowell, of Harvard University, gives some interesting statistics in regard to studies pursued in college and success in the work of the professional school. In a general way he finds that students who enter Harvard College without conditions do well in their college studies and that students who do well in college also do well in the schools of law and medicine, whereas their standing in the professional schools is not dependent on the kinds of studies pursued in college.

The diagram shows the average election of college courses by graduates of the law and medical schools, the broken lines representing the men who graduated from the professional schools with honors and the plain lines those who did not. It is apparent that the future law students took more work in history, government and economics, and the future medical students more work in the natural sciences. But the law students who in college elected more work than the average in history and political science did not do better than the others, and the medical students who elected more work than the average in