paid in advance and they were prohibited from occupying rooms or using facilities “so as to interfere with the convenience or abridge the privileges of those students having the ministry in view.”*
The faculty reported in 1843 that the policy of admitting non-theologues to the collegiate department had worked well. Approximately thirty had entered, and with few exceptions they had been “regular in their deportment and successful in their studies.” Most of them were members of Baptist churches. Their conduct had been so exemplary that the piety of the ministerial students had not suffered.
The experience of the faculty with non-ministerial students in the collegiate department was doubtless in the minds of the Trustees when they came to consider the declining enrollment of the academic department in the early 1840’s. The losses in this department were explained by the Society’s straightened finances, which made it necessary to curtail the number of beneficiaries. To remedy the situation the Board, on faculty recommendation, decided in 1843 to admit lay preparatory students on the same basis as in the collegiate department. The number of non-ministerial students in the collegiate department grew steadily from five in 1839 to thirty-four in 1845. The aggregate for the academic department, however, in the period from 1843 to 1845 was only twenty-nine.
The total number of students in all departments during the years 1833 to 1846 grew steadily; there were 124 at the beginning of the period and 211 at the end. A year-by-year comparison, however, reveals considerable fluctuation with a low of 120 in 1838 and a peak of 239 in 1841. The collegiate department had the largest registration 40 in 1833, a maximum of 148 in 1842, and 146 in 1846. Enrollment in the academic department varied from a high of 75 in 1833, explained by the inauguration at that time of the six-year course, to a low of 27 in 1841; by 1846 it stood at 34. There were no theological students from 1833 to 1835 because of the course changes. In 1835 there were three; the peak of 34 came in 1840 and then a decline to 30 in 1846.
Statistics on student enrollment must be accepted with caution since they represent only numbers registered at particular dates and do not indicate how long students remained at the Institution. In 1843 Dr. Kendrick wrote that since 1833 more than three-fourths of those who
*Baptist Education Society, Annual Report, 1839, 3, 13-14.
