Note 10 — Front matter

The commissioner of education does not feel himself at liberty to discriminate among the colleges chartered by the different states, but it is well known that in most states the name of college, or preferably that of university, and the power to confer degrees are granted to any institution whatsoever without regard to endowment, scientific equipment, scholarly qualifications of the faculty or adequate preparation of the students. The majority of the so-called colleges and universities of the south and west are really secondary schools. In most of them not only are the greater part of the students really pupils in the preparatory or high school department, but most of the students in the collegiate departments are at graduation barely able to enter upon the sophomore or second year work of the best eastern colleges. Throughout this monograph I have used the word college in speaking of institutions for undergraduate education, except when quoting their official titles, and this whether the college in question is, or is not, included in a larger institution providing also three years of graduate instruction. The terms college and university are used in America without any definite understanding, even among colleges and universities themselves, as to how they shall be differentiated. Probably the most commonly accepted usage is to call an institution a university if it has attached to it various departments, or schools, without regard to the standing of these departments, the preparation of the students entering them, or the work done in them. In this sense all the state universities of the west are called universities because, although many of them are really high schools, they have attached to them schools of pharmacy, veterinary science, agriculture, and sometimes medicine or law. It is in this sense that many institutions for negroes are called universities, because they include various departments of industrial art as well as a high school department. Until very recently the requirements for admission to the departments of law, medicine, dentistry, etc., have been so low that it has been a positive disadvantage to have such schools attached to the college department, and when lately the graduates of Harvard college decided not to allow the graduates of its affiliated schools to vote with them for representatives on the board of trustees, they claimed with justice that the illiberal education of the majority of these graduates would tend to lower the standard of Harvard college. The use of the word university should be strictly limited to institutions offering at least three years of graduate instruction in one or more schools.