Source Document:
“Junior College,” in Paul Monroe, An Cyclopedia of Education (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1912): 573.
Interpretation
Historians of the public junior college have wrongly assumed that the term– junior college – has had a fixed and widely accepted definition from the time of its initial use by Chicago’s William Rainey Harper. These historians have believed that there was consensus that this term, as it was used early in the 20th century, was commonly applied to three, very different sets of institutions: the lower division of a few universities (most notably, the University of Chicago), the college-level programs appended to public high schools (following the example set by Joliet High School), and a relatively few, small, “decapitated” private colleges primarily concentrated in Missouri and North Carolina (with Missouri’s’ Stephans College serving as the model of this type of junior college ). However, as suggested by Ellwood P. Cubberley’s essay in the 1912 edition of Paul Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, denotation of the term “junior college” was, in fact, far narrower than is now assumed to have been the case. Indeed, as indicated by Cubberley, and substantiated by other sources, educators, at least, initially applied this term to a very small number of institutions–the lower divisions of major universities– and only gradually came to apply the term more widely over the course of the 1920s.
Cubberley, whose submission to the Cylopedia, which well have been the first definition of this new institutional form, asserts without any qualification that the term, junior college, should be applied solely to the lower divisions of the Universities of Chicago and California. It has been only "by transfer," Cubberley goes on, that the term was being increasingly (and, one senses, from Cubberely’s perspective inaccurately) applied to the postgraduate programs found in some public high schools. Interestingly, he makes no reference to “decapitated” private colleges.
H.A.
Spindt's research into the etymology of “junior
college” suggests that at least some of Cubberely’s
contemporaries shared his view that the term, in its strict and proper use, did
not properly apply either to public high school postgraduate programs (also
described as "six year high schools" by Hedgepeth
and even William Rainey Harper) or small, private colleges. For example, Will
C. Wood, then California’s commissioner of secondary education, noted in his
1914 report to the California legislature that he only referred to the state’s
many postgraduate programs as junior colleges "for convenience." 
Indeed,
if state law is any indication, the use of the term “junior college” to
describe college-level programs offered through public high schools did not
gain any degree of general acceptance until 1917. In the case of California,
the so-called Caminetti Act of 1907 (frequently cited
as the first state legislation to permit the organization of a public junior
college), in fact only authorized public high schools to offer
"postgraduate courses of study." Not until 1917 did the California
legislature specifically permit the organization of “junior colleges.” Other
states took even longer to specifically authorize public high schools to
organize junior colleges. The 1917 Kansas law used by such communities as Fort
Scott and Garden City to justify their junior colleges, in fact only authorized
these communities to create a "two-year course in advance of the course
prescribed from accredited high schools."
At
the same time, even by the early 1920s, the inclusive denotation that the term
“junior colleges” has enjoyed to this day had gained widespread acceptance,
even among well-informed laymen. One incident demonstrates that by, by this
time, well-informed laymen not only recognized that a public junior college was
something quite different than a high school-sponsored postgraduate program,
but that they were sufficiently confident in their understanding of this difference
to publicly criticize any schoolman who attempted to pass a postgraduate
program off as a junior college. In 1922, for example, W. H. Person, mayor of
The Junior College voted on March 31 will be housed in the High School. It will not have Junior College equipment and will be taught by High School teachers in their spare time. This amounts to nothing more than two years of postgraduate High School work. This may be a good thing, but why call it a Junior College when it is not?
Clearly, Pearson understood the distinction between a postgraduate high school program and a junior college, and believed that his community had voted to create the former, not the latter. As he would argue elsewhere, a "real" junior college would have operated on a county-wide basis, with its own governing board, facilities, and faculty.
The
significance of the etymology of “junior college” rests in the light it sheds
on the gradual, but seemingly inevitable, transformation of a great many local
and poorly coordinated experiments by public high schools with postgraduate
education, the earliest dating to the late 19th century, into
something approaching a national movement, whose unity around a set of common
ideals would be expressed through the adoption of a uniform language. During
the early, experimental phase, a community such as
Source:
Junior College - A term used by the
University of Chicago, the University of California, and a few other
institutions of higher learning to designate that part of the four-years’
college course embraced in the freshman and sophomore years, the college course
being thus divided into a junior college of two years, and a senior college of
two years. The outline of instruction, or the requirements as
to work and electives, vary in the two divisions, being more largely
prescribed in the lower division than in the higher. One object of the division
is to make a separation between what is pure college work and what is the
beginning of university work; another is to form a basis for the radiation of
professional instruction, beginning with the junior year; another is to
encourage small colleges of limited endowment to limit their work to that of
the junior college, and then make the transfer of their students easy by
admitting them to the senior college; and another is to encourage the larger
and better equipped high schools to gradually add a thirteenth and a fourteenth
year to the high school course of instruction, and thus stimulate the building
up of junior colleges in the larger cities. The term has thus, by transfer, all
come to mean a two years’ course of instruction beyond the four-year high
school, and a number of city school systems to-day speak of having the first
year, or both years, of a junior college. The legislature of California in 1906
authorized cities to establish such course of instruction, covering two years
beyond the ordinary high school course, and a number of city high schools have
now added one year, and a few are planning to add two years. A number of
colleges in the
Contributor: Robert Pedersen
Last Updated: