OCGASniUL PAPERS ON THE HISTORY IH^ OOSTOH COLLEGE STUDENT ENROLLMENT AT BOSTON COLLEGE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Rev. Charles F. Donovan, S.J. University Historian January, 1984 ioanroiv college: ARCHIVBs Upon consulting the Boston College catalogues of the nineteenth century, one finds that the enrollment in 1870 was 128, that it topped 200 (202) in 1877, went over 300 (334) in 1890 and was 472 in 1898. But those figures take on a different meaning when it is recalled that during that period the curriculum at Boston Col- lege was a seven year program that em- braced a preparatory as well as a colle- giate division, with the majority of stu- dents in the lower division. Thus, if we look only at the upper three classes we see that in the year the College awarded its first A.B. degrees, 1877, there were 36 collegiate students. The collegiate enrollment reached 91 in 1880, 101 in 1885, and 186 in 1898. It was not at all unusual in the nine- teenth century for colleges to have pre- paratory departments. Private academies were limited in number and location, high schools were in an incipient stage, and colleges found they had to provide transitional preparation for grade school graduates to bring them up to college entrance level. One historian of higher education, Frederick Rudolph, says that in 1870 only twenty-six colleges in the country were not operating preparatory departments.' So there was nothing ‘unAmerican’ about Boston College run- ning a preparatory department, except that Boston College was not doing it as a stopgap to meet a temporary educa- tional problem in the United States but in conformity with a centuries-old Jesuit educational tradition. The famous European Jesuit colleges of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, following the code for liberal edu- cation established by the Society of Jesus for all its colleges in the Ratio Studiorum, took students through a graded classical education, starting with rudiments of Latin and Greek and culminating six, seven, or eight years later with the course in philosophy that finally led to the bachelor’s degree. The same pattern had been followed at Georgetown, Ford- ham, St. Louis, Santa Clara and other Jesuit colleges founded in America be- fore Boston College. All had a seven, later an eight, year program that em- braced preparatory and college years in a continuum, with all the students shar- ing the same campus and buildings and, as at Boston College until 1899 when for the first time separate catalogues were published for the two divisions, a com- mon catalogue which listed students alphabetically with their class or grade after their name, a fourteen year old C. Murphy in lowest rudiments coming be- fore a twenty-one year old D. Murphy who had attained the eminence of the class of philosophy. That the older or collegiate students did not dissociate themselves from the younger is attested by an item in the Stylus in 1888 which reported on the enrollments in the twenty- [ 2 ] six Jesuit colleges in America in the year 1886-7, noting that the average enroll- ment was 231 and rather proudly stating that Boston College exceeded the average by more than forty. Since there were only 96 students in the upper three classes in 1886-7, it is clear that the students were reporting and accepting as applicable the total enrollments of Jesuit institutions with preparatory and collegiate divisions combined. 2 Compared to today’s huge college en- rollments and Boston College’s annual Freshman class of over 2000, the num- bers of students in the College prior to 1900 seem tiny. But the numbers must be seen in the light of the circumstances of the time. In 1870 only 1.7% of young people between the ages of 18 and 21 years of age were attending college and the number had only gone up to 3% by 1900.^ Another way of judging size of collegiate enrollment in the nineteenth century is to look at the number of stu- dents being prepared for college. The records of the Boston schools show that in 1864, the year Boston College opened, the venerable Boston Latin School gra- duated only eleven young men. Ten years later the number of graduates was 31. In 1898 Latin School graduated 49.^ Those were surely not large numbers for the city’s principal supplier of candidates for entrance to college. Colleges with enrollments under a hundred were commonplace in the nine- teenth century. Frederick Rudolph notes that in the middle of the century the two colleges then existing in New York City, with its half million population, had a combined enrollment of only 247, that [ 3 ] about the same time the board of trustees of Lafayette College was larger than the student body, and that just be- fore the Civil War there were twenty-two colleges in Ohio with an average enroll- ment of 85. At the end of the century the small- enrollment college remained the mode in American higher education. In 1898 the Secretary of War published a report concerning a hundred and one institutions with federally supported military cadet programs.^’ Only five of the colleges had enrollments over 1000, (three of them being Harvard, Yale, and MIT) while eight had enrollments between 1000. 500 and I'hat year, which was the first year the college division at Boston College ex- tended to four years, the enrollment here was 186. Compare with that the enroll- ments of these colleges listed report of the Secretary of War: in the Massachusetts Agricultural College 75 University of New Hampshire 75 University of Rhode Island 67 Rutgers 162 Ford ham 140 Michigan State 190 Purdue 60 Maryland 109 Seton Hall 72 Alabama 120 Louisiana State 185 Tennessee 179 Washington 117 [ 4 ] On the Secretary of War’s representative list of American colleges there were many with enrollments larger than Boston Col- lege’s in 1898, but the above list of institu- tions with comparable or smaller enroll- ments shows that even with fewer than 200 college students Boston College was by no means, on that account, a feeble or un- usually small college at the time. Boston College’s first graduating class of twelve young men in 1877 seems small, especially since the college had been in existence for twelve years before the first great prefect of studies (as the dean was then called). Father Robert Fulton, would permit the class of philos- ophy to be added, completing the cur- riculum leading to the bachelor’s degree. But again that figure of twelve graduates takes on a different perspective when it is compared with the number graduating the same year from the older Jesuit col- leges. The catalogues of the several Jesuit Colleges for the year 1876-7 show the following numbers of students awarded the bachelor’s degree at Commencement in June: Georgetown, founded in 1789, 7; St. Louis, founded in 1818, 3; Spring Hill, founded in 1830, 3; Xavier in Cin- cinnati, founded in 1831, 7; Fordham, founded in 1841, 5; Holy Cross, founded in 1843, 13; Santa Clara, founded in 1851, 11; Loyola in Baltimore, founded in 1852, none; and the College of St. Igna- tius, now the University of San Francisco, founded in 1855, 1. In light of those num- bers, Boston College’s first graduating class must have seemed almost robust. By June 1900, after its twenty-fourth Commencement, Boston College had granted the bachelor’s degree to 423 men. [ 5 ] a small band, to be sure, but how relative size is. It was representatives of that small band that Father Thomas Gasson stirred a few years later when he told the alumni in May, 1907 that he needed ten million dollars to move the College from the South End to a more expansive setting, to add to the faculty distinguished lay professors, and to strengthen the physical sciences.^ A heady challenge for an institution with fewer than five hundred graduates. Those may have been small-number days, but they weren’t days of small dreams or hearts. The challenge was met and we marvel today at the scale and quality of the achievement. [ 6 ] NOTES •Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Fran- cisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1977), p. 160. ^Stylus, VI (October, 1883), p. 45. ^Rudolph, op. cit., p. 152. ^Annual Report of the School Commit- tee of the City of Boston, 1864, 1874, 1898.* ^Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopp, 1962), p. 219. ^U.S. Serial Set 3630, 55th Congress, 2nd Session, Dec. 6, 1897-July 8, 1898, pp. 226-233. ^The Pilot, June 1, 1907. [ 7 ] Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/studentenrollmenOOdono V >■