ELIGIBILITY RULES AND THE THREE-YEAR DEGREE.

The athletic agreement existing between Harvard, Princeton and Yale, by which Freshmen and graduate students are rendered ineligible for athletic teams, clearly contemplates three years as the length of time in which men shall be eligible for university teams. Here at Harvard the three-year degree, which is now taken advantage of by a very considerable proportion of every class in College, is depriving the teams of many men who might add considerable strength by playing for an additional year on a team. The two things, the three-year degree which cuts down athletic eligibility to two years because Freshman year is eliminated, are not in accord.

Just now important the three-year degree is numerically, may not be generally understood. Figures in recent president's reports indicate that nearly one fourth of the men in each class are now leaving College or entering a graduate school at the end of Junior year or in the middle of Senior year. It is easy to see how the loss of such a part of each Senior class may interfere very seriously with athletics. One can readily call to mind several recent cases in which Harvard teams have been deprived of good athletes, who were ineligible during what would naturally have been their Senior year in College.

The three-year degree is too well established as an institution to be easily changed; and it probably is to the interest of many undergraduates to finish their College course in three years. But the injury which the three-year degree is working in our athletic teams might be very much lessened if the eligibility rules were so changed as to permit men who finish their College course in three years to remain in athletics another year while studying for the degree of A. M. in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. To establish eligibility on its original wide basis is hardly desirable, for to do so would mean a new crop of the old petty questions which were continually arising up to 1905. To make the change would probably require the consent of Princeton and Yale, which are parties to the agreement and would involve the granting of a like privilege at those universities, though as a matter of fact in neither of them is the three year degree more than a negligible factor in athletic conditions.