Necessarily the quality of work was low, though many institutions struggled for the maintenance of respectable standards.

One college president frankly said: "We are liberal about letting young men into the Freshman class, but particular about letting them out." It was not uncommon for half of a first year class to be found deficient and turned back at the end of the year, or dismissed as hopeless.

Obviously this was a wasteful method of determining competency.
Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, founded in 1873 by the gifts of "Commodore" Vanderbilt, was the first Southern institution with anything approaching an adequate endowment and was the first to insist upon thorough preparation for entrance, though it was compelled to organize a sub-freshman class in the beginning.

Its policy had considerable influence both upon college standards and upon the growth of private preparatory schools.

The development of public schools, for a time, had made the work of colleges in general more difficult, because they supplanted scores of private academies which had done passably well the work of college preparation and yet were not themselves able to prepare students for college in the first years of their existence.