Omaha daily bee., 1905-10-08
The College Girl.

vate as in the public universities in this
country.
The College Girl.
The most truly distinctive feature of
American college life is the American col
lege girl.
She is nearly 5000 strong, exclusive of
the normal students. She hocks by herself
in colleges established and conducted espe-
cially for her use and behoof by the thou
sand, and in coeducational colleges along
with her brother, her cousin, her sweet
heart and other young men by the tens of
thousands, 1t would be hard to say whether
the "co-ed" or the distinctively womans
college girl is the more desirable product.
In some quarters it is thought that the
problem of college education for women
has been solved best at Columbia and Har-
ward, where they may take the same
courses of study, wholly or in part, un-
der the guidance of the same faculty as
the men. Somewhat similar schemes are
in force at Brown, the Western Reserve
and Tulane universities.
Nevertheless, the strictly womans colleges
like Vassar, now forty years old; Welles-
! ley and Smith, ten years younger, and
Bryn Mawr. founded only twenty years ago,
but likely to last century, are hourishing
like veritable bay trees, and so are the big
coed" colleges.
The woman's college presidents make up
small class, but their influence is out of
proportion to their numbers Two of them
are men, curiousy enough, but the others
| are women. Miss Thomas of Bryn Mawr,
Miss Hazard of Wellesley, Miss Woolley
Of Mount Holyoke and the rest of them
are surely impressng strong personal
influence of the young women students I'M
der their direction, and so. indirectly, upon
| the world at large.
| Not only very large percentage OF stu
| dents are earning their way through, as
| self-reliant and as Independent as any one
on earth, but the average of devotion to
study is as high today in the colleges of
the United States as 1t ever was in all the
history of college education, either in
America or elsewhere.
Western Colleges Forging Ahead.
The shifting Of the college attendance
within the last few years has been remark
able. OF the fifty-four colleges and uni
versities, each of which has an attendance
of loo or more, thirty-fve are located
in THE west" a surprising statement 10
many, no doubt, but perfectly true, II the
old eastern boundary of the west" the
Alleghenies, be accepted. Moreover, the at
! tendance at some OF these new western
! colleges and universities is much larger,
in comparison with the older eastern uni
verslties, than most folk suppose.
Harvard, with 1898 students, still leads
and Columbia comes next, with 4,Ss3 but
| IL is a western unversity-Chicago. with
4,5SO-that comes third. Then comes the
| Northwestern with 1907; Ann Arbor, with
1000; the University Of Minnesota, with
$500; the University of Illinois, with 1854;
Cornell (easteTn). with 3,428; the University
Of California, with S4OO, and the University
| OF Wisconsin, with 3,151.
Pennsylvania has only 2692, only a little
more than 400 in excess of the 226s in at
| tendance al Washington university ST.
Louis, Yale also falls below the 5000
mark. the number being 1886. while the
| University Of Georgia (southernl, with ., 4s1,
| has nearly twice many as famous
Princeton, with its 1873, and the University
OF Nebraska, with 2,5l3. lacks less than 100
Of doubling the Princeton figures.
| The University of Texas, OF which many
fasteners have never heard, almost equals
| Princeton in attendance with l .34s, and Le-
land Stanford. with Lass, has about 100
more than Princeton, Other figures Just
as surprising might be given. hut they are
as nothing TO the figures that will be
needed to represent the future growth OF
the universities OF the west-Chicago Inter
| Ocean.