University Education

Abstract

IN his inaugural address to the Royal Statistical Society on November 20, the president, Prof. Major Greenwood, discussed the “Recent History and Function of University Education”. Speaking of the statistical changes in the proportion of males in England and Wales who have entered upon a uni versity course since 1801, Prof. Greenwood estimated that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Oxford and Cambridge were the only English universities, about one-half per cent of males had a university education, a very slightly larger proportion at the middle of the nineteenth century and now about 2 per cent. In Germany, before the Nazi regime, it was estimated that not more than 3 per cent of university students came from working class families. It is unlikely that the proportion is more than 10 per cent in England and Wales. An author writing in the first volume of the Society's Journal estimated that the universities of Great Britain had a total revenue in 1831 of £800,000 per annum; in 1931-32 their total income was £5,874,778, of which more than £2,000,000 came from Parlia mentary grants.