impossible clear thinking as to educational
institutions and educational aims.

The term "college" can be properly used only of an institution which
offers training in the liberal arts and sciences to youth who have
completed a standard secondary school course of study. The purpose of
college teaching is to lay the foundation for intelligent and
effective specialization later on, to open the mind to new
interpretations and new understandings both of man and of nature, and
to give instruction in those standards of judgment and appreciation,
the possession and application of which are the marks of the truly
educated and cultivated man. The size of a college is a matter of
small importance, except that under modern conditions a large college
and one in immediate contact with the life of a university is almost
certain to command larger intellectual resources than is an
institution of a different type. The important thing about a college
is its spirit, its clearness of aim, its steadiness of purpose, and
the opportunity which it affords for direct personal contact between
teacher and student. Given these, the question of size is unimportant.

There was a time when it was felt, probably correctly, that a
satisfactory college training could be had by requiring all students
to follow a single prescribed course of study. At that time, college
students were drawn almost exclusively from families and homes of a
single type or kind. Their purposes in after-life were similar, and
their range of intellectual sympathy, while intense, was rather
narrow. The last fifty years have changed all this. College students
are now drawn from families and homes of every conceivable type and
kind. Their purposes in after-life are very different, while new
subjects of study have been multiplied many fold. The old and useful
tradition of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, together with a little
history and literature, as the chief elements in a college course of
study, had to give way when first the natural sciences, and then the
social sciences, claimed attention and when even these older subjects
of study were themselves subdivided into many parts.

These changes forced a change in the old-fashioned program of college
study, and led to the various substitutes for it that now exist.
Whether a college prefers the elective system of study, or the group
system, or some other method of combining instruction that is regarded
as fundamental with other ins