GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS There are many questions connected with the college education of American women which possess great interest for the student of social science. =Number of college women=—In the year 1897–98[44] there were studying in the undergraduate and graduate departments of coeducational colleges and universities 17,338 women, and in the undergraduate and graduate departments of independent and affiliated women’s colleges, division A, 4,959 women, women forming thus 27.4 per cent of the total number of graduate and undergraduate students. The 22 colleges belonging to the Association of collegiate alumnæ, which are, on the whole, the most important colleges in the United States admitting women, have conferred the bachelor’s degree on 12,804 women. If we add to these the graduates of the Women’s college of Brown university, 102 in number, and the graduates of the 14 additional coeducational colleges included in my list of the 58 most important colleges in the United States, we obtain, including those graduating in June, 1899, a total of 14,824 women holding the bachelor’s degree.[45] There is thus formed, even leaving out of account the graduates of the minor colleges, a larger body of educated women than is to be found in any other country in the world. These graduates have received the most strenuous college training obtainable by women in the United States, which does not differ materially from the best college training obtainable by American men (indeed, women graduates of coeducational colleges have received precisely the same training as men), and may fairly be compared with the women who have received college and university training abroad. In other countries women university graduates, or even women who have studied at universities, are very few;[46] in America, on the other hand, the higher education of women has assumed the proportions of a national movement still in progress. We may perhaps be able to guide in some degree its future development, but it has passed the experimental stage and can no longer be opposed with any hope of success. Its results are to be reckoned with as facts.