Subjects of social welfare / by Sir Lyon Playfair.

  • Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Subjects of social welfare / by Sir Lyon Playfair. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    364/424 (page 352)
    not responded to the demands for higher qualifications; because, though they have sent numerous candidates, these are in a worse state of preparation than formerly, as indi- cated by their increased proportion of failures. Thus, though matriculation candidates are more numerous, the candidates for degrees do not augment, nor do the gradu- ates substantially increase in number. One thing does increase in a notable degree, and that is the ages of the graduates. If we take the three decennial periods of the operation of the university, this will be apparent: in the first periods, the average age of art graduates was less than twenty-two; in the second it was twenty-two and a half; and in the third it was close on twenty-five years. At this rate of increase, the time may come when the University of London will have to rule, as the Emperor of China has done in regard to its great Chinese prototype, that if a candidate regularly attend all examinations, though without success, till he is eighty years of age, he then becomes a graduate de jure. The increase of age is not a good sign. It shows that instead of being for the many, the ambition of the University of London is to become a fancy and a select university for the few. This is the reason why the influence of that uni- versity, apart from its matriculation, is so singularly small in comparison with the area which it professes to cover. For the last ten years the average number of all its graduates, scholastic, scientific, legal, and medical, is 130; while the arts degrees alone in the two Irish universities amount to 338 ; and yet the proposal has been made to reconstruct them on the type of the University of London, which would be to replace an excellent productive machine by a singularly unproductive one—a strange phenomenon in the history of human progress ! The stereotyped answers to all such comparisons are well known. Look to the wide extent of subjects and the difficulty of attainment of the London degrees in comparison