The number of students instructed at Temple College in proportion to money expended and buildings used is altogether out of proportion to any other college in America.  Some idea of the breadth of study presented at Temple College may be had from a comparison with Harvard.  Harvard has more than five thousand students, four hundred instructors, and presents five hundred courses of study.  Its growth since 1860 has been wonderful.  In 1860, while one man might not have been able in four years to master all the subjects offered, he could have done so in six.  It was estimated in 1899 that the courses of study offered were so varied that sixty years would have been required.  It would take one student ninety-six years to take all the courses presented by the Temple College.

From the time of the opening of Temple College up to the closing exercises of 1905, its students have numbered 55,656.  If an answer is desired to the question, “Is such an institution needed,” that number answers is most emphatically.  That more than fifty thousand people, the majority of them wording men and women, will give their nights after a day of toil, to study, proves that the institution that gives them the opportunity to study is sorely needed.

The life story of men and women who have studied here and gone on to lives of usefulness would make interesting reading.  One young girl who lived in the mill district of Kensington was earning $2.50 a week, folding circulars, addressing envelopes and doing such work.  Her parents were poor.  She had the most meagre education, and the outlook for her to earn more was dark.  Some one advised her to go to Temple College at night and study bookkeeping.  A few years after, her well-wisher saw her one evening at the college, bright, happy, a different girl in both dress and deportment She had a position as bookkeeper at $10 a week and was going on now and taking other courses.

That is the ordinary story of the work Temple College does, multiplied in thousands of lives.  Others are not so ordinary.  One of the early students was a poor man earning $6.00 a week.  To-day he is earning $6,000 a year in a government position at Washington, his rise in life due entirely to the opportunities of study offered him at Temple College.  A lady who had been brought up in refined and cultured society was compelled to support herself, her husband and child through his complete physical breakdown.  She took the normal course in dressmaking and millinery, and has this year been appointed the Director of the Domestic Science work in a large institution at a very good salary, being able to keep herself and family in comfort.  One of the present college students was a weaver without any education at all, getting not only his elementary education and his preparatory education here, but will next year graduate from the college department.  He has been entirely self-supporting in the meantime, and will make a fine teacher of mathematics.  He has been teaching extra classes in the evening department of the College for several years.