or senior year in the
prescribed courses of students in special departments such as
agriculture, engineering, and law. This statement applies doubtless to
many thousands of technical students.[18]

In view of these divergencies in practice we must hesitate to declare
that the subject should be begun at precisely this or that point in
the college course. These differences, to be sure, are in many cases
the result of accidental factors in the college curriculum, and often
have been determined by illogical departmental rivalries within the
faculty rather than by wise and disinterested educators studying the
merits of the case. But in large part these differences are the
expression of different purposes and practical needs in planning a
college curriculum, and are neither quite indefensible nor necessarily
contradictory in pedagogic theory. In the small college with a nearly
uniform curriculum and with limited means, a general course is perhaps
best planned for the senior year, or in the junior year if there is an
opportunity given to the student to do some more advanced work the
year following. At the other extreme are some larger institutions in
which the pressure of new subjects within the arts curriculum has
shattered the fixed curriculum into fragments. This has made possible
specialization along any one of a number of lines. Where this idea is
carried out to the full, every general group of subjects eventually
must make good its claim to a place in the freshman year for its
fundamental course. But inasmuch as, in most institutions, the
freshman year is still withheld from this free elective plan by the
requirement of a small group of general subjects, economics is first
open to students in the sophomore year. The license of the elective
system is of course much moderated by the requirement to elect a
department, usually at the beginning either of the sophomore or of the
junior year, and within each department both a more or less definite
sequence of courses and a group of collateral requirements are usually
enforced. Where resources are very limited it is probably best to give
the economics course in the last two years, but where several more
specialized courses in economics are given, it should be introduced as
early as the sophomore year. If a freshman course in the subject is
given it should be historical, descriptive, or methodical (e.g.,
statistical methods, graphics, etc.) rather than theoretical. The
experien