The following article, reprinted from the Yale News, forms part of a "comparison of the educational systems in use at the present time in the larger Eastern colleges." It is run here at such length because, though a product of anonymity, it serves excellently in presenting the extra-Harvard undergraduate's interpretation and evaluation of the present educational system of the University.

....There are, however, two colleges that do not arrange their curriculums on these lines. (The writer has been dwelling on the absence of an adequate freedom of choice in course selections in certain colleges.) They are probably the foremost educational institutions of the country, Columbia and Harvard.

The system in force at Columbia is flexible in the extreme; so flexible is it, in fact, that it is difficult to reach any general conclusions about it....It is here that Columbia's system is at fault, in allowing too much freedom to her undergraduates in removing too completely faculty direction of their choice of studies. This is a fault, however, that is infinitely more desirable than that which one finds in most of the colleges taken up in this article, that of allowing too little freedom to their students.

The system now in use at Harvard is, I believe, unquestionably the best of those surveyed here. It is the only one that has a logical, well worked out theory of education behind it. The others seem to have grown up, hit or miss, with the years and the theory behind them, which I have expounded above is childish in comparison. Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Williams and Dartmouth have succeeded, by some miracle of inefficiency, in interfering both too much and too little in their students' choice of studies. Too much--because for the first two years they suppress all individuality, practically dictating what the undergraduate shall and shall not study, regardless of his abilities, inclinations and interests. Too little--because for the last two years they let him take almost anything he wants (provided a certain amount of it is in his major) and make no systematic attempt at ordering and correlating his courses, at giving unity to his program of studies. For two years the teacher makes the class recite in unison their A B C's and two years he turns them loose in the library to read anything they may fancy. Is it any wonder that the undergraduate, after two years in which he has been allowed no choice at all, is unable to make good use of the unlimited choice that is suddenly thrust upon him? Is it any wonder that his choice of these last two years, which should be the perfect crown of his whole education, is often badly balanced, purposeless and haphazard?

No one who has compared the regulations of the various colleges given above can fail to observe that the great superiority of the Harvard system over the rest, including our own, is the fact that there is some plan about it, some attempt at a rational ordering of each student's curriculum. We talk vaguely of "laying a good foundation" and of "two years of concentrated study" and we boast that our graduates are well-rounded as well as being rather deeply learned in one direction. I say they are neither.....Intellectually I am Gilbert's "a thing of rags and patches;" my mind has not the unity of a poor house beef stew.....Many students at Yale are not sure of what they are majoring in until the end of their Junior year. Some do not find out until they graduate. Some never know--but enough.

To turn to pleasanter things, let us conclude this survey by a consideration of the peculiar virtues of Harvard's "Rules for Concentration and Distribution." The chief advantage of the Harvard plan is this; from the end of his Freshman year, the Harvard student knows roughly what he is going to do with the rest of his college course. He does not stumble aimlessly about changing his plans--if he has any--from year to year and harried continually by the necessity of meeting the "requirements". He is also assigned a tutor who performs for him the invaluable service of correlating his courses, that is of making his program a whole that hangs logically together and has some meaning rather than an assemblage of miscellaneous courses. It is evident, then, that the Harvard student has two inestimable advantages over the Yale or the Dartmouth student; (1) an ordered plan of study for his last three years; (2) a tutor, whom he sees at frequent intervals, and who acts as his guide in planning and following out his program of studies. In respect to this second point let me remark that in my three years at Yale no professor has made an attempt to give me an idea of the relationship of my various courses and of the end to which they tend. There are two reasons for this: (1) it is not part of our professors' job to give such advice, and (2) no one could do it with my courses anyway.

Thus Harvard avoids both the over-interference in her students choice of studies that characterizes the first two years at other colleges, and she also avoids the lack of systematic faculty direction that is characteristic of the last two years at the other colleges. She avoids the one by greatly decreasing the number of required subjects, only requiring (after Freshman year, which also is much freer than in most colleges) four courses altogether. She avoids the other by having her students plan their whole course early in their college career and most of all by assigning them tutors, whose business it is to supply just that direction that is lacking in Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, etc.

It is for these reasons that I believe Harvard's "Rules for Concentration and Distribution" to be the most satisfactory system of requirements now in use among the larger Eastern colleges. Torquemada in The Yale News.