The ideal of higher education in the West suffers from an habitual exaggeration of speech. Nothing is more conducive to clear and accurate thinking than a strictly accurate vocabulary. The custom of calling institutions which do only secondary work—some of which offer a limited course of even this work—colleges, and of naming colleges universities, tends to mislead and confuse the public mind as to the distinctions between the different kinds of institutions and as to the essential character of each. The inhabitants of the West find their defense for this custom of giving things disproportionate names in the general vastness of their surroundings and in the consequent vastness of their plans and hopes. One of the simplest and surest remedies for the vague and contradictory notions now suggested in the phrase higher education, may be found in giving to every institution of learning a name that frankly implies the limit of its work; and every institution would gain in dignity through this nomenclature. Nominal honors are too easy in Western institutions; and the conditions upon which different institutions confer them are so various that they have ceased to convey any fixed notion of the kind and amount of intellectual discipline which those bearing them have received. The remedies for this are to be found in some concerted action among the colleges by which they will agree upon minimum requirements for admission to any one of them. The minimum adopted by the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ might answer this purpose. This would tend, not only to unify but also to raise the average requirements for admission to college, and this in turn would enable secondary schools to maintain a higher standard than is at present common. As almost all colleges arrange their courses of study to occupy four years, unifying and raising the conditions of entrance would result in unifying and raising the requirements for graduation in the various courses; and this would tend to give to B.A., B.S., and B.L. an intelligible and honorable significance, long since lost. Legislative action could be taken in the different States, at least with reference to new colleges as they shall be founded, limiting the authority to confer degrees to those institutions adopting these improved minimum requirements; this would elevate the public ideal of the higher education and tend to save our young people from being betrayed by words and alphabetical combinations. The defects above indicated should be frankly admitted to exist, but they are less universal and less disastrous than people living in the Eastern States are disposed to consider them.