Two of the University's other divisions, the college of Veterinary Medicine and the school of Nursing, make two years of college training a pre-requisie for admission. The other units, the School of Business Administration, the Law School, the Medical College, and the small School of Nutrition are regular graduate schools, except that qualified Cornell undergraduates can enter them after three years of study. A fifteenth division of the University, the school of Education, has no full-time students of its own, but serves chiefly to guide prospective teachers in specialized fields in arranging their programs.

Public-Private Relationship

This diversity in educational structure undoubtedly gives Cornell something of the atmosphere of the large universities so prominent in many areas of the country outside New England. Cornell, with four state schools, Agriculture, Home Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations, and Veterinary Medicine, comes close to filling the bill of a central state university for New York.

Indeed, Cornell is one of the few American universities that combines state and private schools on the same campus.

The most important and direct state influence on the University lies in the support of the four public colleges through legislative appropriation. State residents, who made up about 85 per cent of the enrollment in the state schools, receive free tuition there, (although not, of course, in the private divisions), and out of state students pay only small tuition fees.

About half of all the recent construction work at Cornell has taken place at the state schools, even though most students are in the privately endowed colleges, another indication of the financial advantage that state institutions have over most private schools. At Cornell, of course, the state and private schools are complementary, rather than directly competing.

In practice, the state also makes some financial contribution to the private divisions of the University. Both state and private schools follow a policy of reimbursing each other for the number of hours devoted to instructing students who take courses outside their own divisions.

The privately endowed Arts college, for instance, pays the Agriculture school a certain sum for each hour Arts students spend taking courses in agriculture. Conversely, the state pays the Arts college for hours agriculture students spend there. An the system works out, more agriculture students spend more time taking more courses in the Arts college than vice versa. So the profit almost always lies on the side of the privately endowed colleges.

By the number and variety of its component units alone, Cornell is assured of obtaining a highly diversified student body. Not many Eastern schools have agricultural, engineering, veterinary, and liberal arts concentrators rubbing shoulders even figuratively on the same campus. Of course the contact is not that close or constant in the normal scholastic course of things at Cornell, since the student bodies in the individual schools tend to be clearly defined and fairly cohesive groups, especially in their later undergraduate years. But in extra-curricular activities, particularly in athletics, there is considerable mixing among students from the many branches of the University.

In terms of geographical distribution, the Cornell student body does not exhibit an equivalent degree of diversity. While the University has students from every state and from nearly 70 foreign countries, and admissions officers strive for ever wider distribution, Cornell is still to a large extent a New York State school, with close to sixty per cent of its students from within the state.

In the Arts college, enrollment is more evenly divided between in and out of state students. But the state-supported schools, about 85 per cent composed of New York State residents, tip the balance in the University as a whole. This heavy proportion is not really surprising, since the New York State population probably contains enough college students to fill a dozen schools of Cornell's size. But the heavy New York State representation, especially in the undergraduate divisions, probably makes the Cornell community somewhat less cosmopolitan than are several of the other Ivy League schools.

One persistent problem of American education which perhaps appears in more acute form at Cornell than at any other Ivy League institution is the question of specialization versus so-called "liberal education."

New Educational Philosophy

Cornell pioneered among Eastern colleges in introducing the elements of technical and vocational training into higher education along side the liberal arts. One of the aims of the guiding spirits behind the establishment of the school, Western Union magnate Ezra Cornell and first president Andrew Dickson White, was to create an institution in which "any person could study any subject."

At the time, in the middle 1860's, such an educational philosophy seemed to challenge much of the basis of American higher education, with its emphasis on purely classical training. White and Cornell immensely broadened the college curriculum. In addition to teaching "agriculture and the mechanic arts", they placed the natural sciences on a level with the humanities. They also helped to make modern languages and literature, and above all, history and political science standard parts of college training. The first chair of American history in the United States was established at Cornell.