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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE The need for some uniformity also became one of the major concerns of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, almost immediately upon its creation in the spring of 1905. One year later, the foundation undertook to define, in terms which could be widely understood and easily applied, what it considered to be reasonable and proper secondary-school preparation for admission to a bona-fide undergraduate institution. Accepting that the four-year curriculum of the better high schools required participation each year in four courses meeting five times a week, the foundation described successful work in each such course as completion of one unit of preparation for possible further study. Thus, most high school students accumulated sixteen units of credit in earning their diplomas. The foundation announced that it would recognize as a college (and, consequently, make eligible for its main program: providing retirement benefits) only those institutions which would require for admission fourteen Carnegie units, as they came to be known. Obviously, it had no objection to those prestigious institutions which were already requiring the equivalent of fifteen or even sixteen units, nor could it criticize those schools, also including some of the most prestigious, which continued to require their own examinations of all candidates for admission.182 While this step by the Carnegie Foundation did bring a greater degree of order and uniformity into the necessary relations between secondary schools and colleges, it also imposed upon the latter the pressing task of determining whether their own curricula were of truly college level, not repeating work that their students had already completed, and sufficient to prepare those students who wished later to engage in graduate study. Writing in 1907, the president of the foundation was convinced that the main factor in determining "the final efficiency or the dynamic force of a college" was the "quality of requirements for admission." He reported that, after a study of the catalogues of some 950 institutions of higher education, the officers of the foundation had been "astonished at the lack of any approach to uniformity" in such requirements. Some colleges which granted degrees appeared to have no entrance requirements, while others demanded no more than the equivalent of one, three, seven, or eight Carnegie units. In the opinion of the foundation, the worst offenders were those colleges announcing requirements which they did not then enforce. The "real institutions of higher 182The first annual report of the foundation, containing its definition of a unit and of a college, was published in October 1906. The foundation made clear that it had borrowed the concept of the unit from several existing agencies. 54