Fact and Comment

There is less use than formerly of such terms. as the "Big Three" or the "Big Four" in college phraseology. No college can afford to talk of participation in such a title when any bright autumn, after the various registrations are computed, it is liable to find itself a dozen numbers, more or less, further down the list than it supposed it was. It seems but half a dozen years ago, though it is really more, since one thought of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, possibly including Columbia, Cornell, or Pennsylvania, as the "big" universities of the country, meaning in numbers. Now we may perceive that in the reckoning by numbers alone Harvard is sixth down the list, Yale is seventeenth, and Princeton twenty-sixth in the list, while Columbia has not only attained the front rank, but got so far ahead of it that there seems almost to be a vacancy in the second place. Of the universities which come next, California now impressive with 8,180 students, and Chicago with its 7,131, were almost unknown in the palmy days of the "Big Four." But this change in order does not argue decadence by any means, in those universities which formerly led. They have had uninterrupted prosperity, as a rule, and an increase of their own. Numbers may indicate prosperity, but there is a prosperity more substantial than they indicate. There is such a thing as an increase of quality as well as of quantity, and those universities which face a limitation of their physical expansion are forced to give their efforts to that. But both kinds of increase are encouraging signs of our national progress, and in them all true friends of education rejoice.