THE PRESIDENT'S REPORT.

The annual report of President Eliot, covering the last academic year, which is made public today, is notable on account of the statements it contains concerning the maintenance of the college course leading to the degree of A.B. and the relation of that course to the professional schools. Only recently Yale University has definitely declared its intention to abstain from the policy of requiring some degree in Arts or Science, or an equivalent standard, for admission to its professional schools; and President Butler of Columbia University in his recently published report, while maintaining that professional study should be based upon a sound foundation of liberal culture has asserted that the first two years of a good college course furnished that foundation, and should earn the bachelor's degree. Harvard's policy is now emphatically declared by President Eliot to be one of determined support to the requirement of a bachelor's degree, or its equivalent, for admission to the professional schools, as now in force in the departments of theology, law and medicine at Harvard, and to an even higher standard than has hitherto been set for the degree of A.B. It is true that President Eliot describes the recognition and encouragement now given at Harvard to the three-years' or the three and a half years' college course, but he makes it clear that the quantity of work as measured by the required number of courses, is the same for the three years' course as for the four years' course, while the quality of work as measured by grades has been substantially raised during the past year. In short, President Eliot maintains that Harvard is unshaken in its adherence to the highest standards for both undergraduate and professional departments and shows that this policy strengthens a university numerically, in the long run, in both its higher and its lower members, while assuring to itself a uniform output of highly and liberally trained youth. Dean Briggs n his report to the President on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences touches briefly on the subject, from the standpoint of the College. "I write," he says, "as one who holds that the College is the very heart of the University and that out of the heart are the issues of life; and I write the more earnestly because I see some American universities pushing blindly out from under them the College props on which they stand."

President Eliot's Arguments.

President Eliot begins his discussion of the requirements for the degree of A.B. by reviewing the recent steps by which they have been brought to their present state and sums up as follows:

"It is obvious from this review that the three years' course for the degree of A.B. at Harvard College is intended to demand as much work and as high attainments as are demanded in the four years' course. The governing Boards and the Faculty have had no intention of permitting the requirements for the Harvard A.B. to be lowered, although they have made it possible for diligent stu- dents to attain the degree in three years, or three years and a half. This insistence on the sum of attainments for the degree is the characteristic feature of the whole evolution. Since the general effect of the elective system during the past thirty years has been greatly to raise the quality of the instruction throughout all the courses and half-courses offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, it is obvious that the candidate who shall hereafter obtain the Harvard degree in three years will have to give, on the average, distinct evidences of higher scholarship than has been expected of his predecessors in any former generation.

"The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has now done what it can to combat the great evil of too late entrance upon the professional careers or the business career. It has expressed its preference for the age of eighteen as the age for entering college, and its conviction that boys can be well prepared for college by that age, and it has made it possible for any diligent student to get the degree of