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1. "The State pays for higher education for men and women an average of $146 per session." 
What proportion of this does the State spend for the higher education of women? Not one cent. 
The amount spent for the normal schools is spend directly in the interest of the public elementary schools. The work done in the normal schools consists of four years of high school work plus two years of professional work for those girls who complete the whole course and graduate with a full normal diploma, but out of about 1100 girls who attended the normal schools last year only about 135 graduated, so that by far the largest proportion of those attending the normal schools are doing high school work. 

The function of the normal schools is to train teachers for the elementary schools and it is on this ground that they have heretofore obtained the liberal support of the Legislature. So long as there are, according to the report of the Department of Public Instruction 1910-11, over 7000 white teachers in the elementary schools of the state, and only 476 normal graduates teaching in them it cannot reasonably be claimed that the normal schools have completed their job and, therefore,should enter the field of higher education. Furthermore,the State needs about 2000 new teachers in the elementary schools each year. These teachers should have professional training and it is clear that if each of the four normal schools now established should turn out 125 graduates each year - which is the number Farmville after having been established thirty years, graduated last year, they could not then supply the demand. Therefore, all the work of the normal school should be credited to the elementary schools and not to higher education. 

From the above facts it does not,moreover, appear that it would be wise to convert one of these schools into a college and take it out of its useful field where the harvest is ripe. 

2. "Virginia if 41st in rank,etc." This ranking is unjust to Virginia/and if the Legislature gave all the money appropriated now to all of the higher institutions of the State to the common schools, it would not change our rank according to the standards by which the report which gives us this rand adopted. 

3. A small appropriation of $3500 to $50,000 asked for by a woman's college distributed amongst 10,512 schools would do little toward educating "the 100,000 children in Virginia of school age who are out of school," or to ameliorate the other lamentable conditions described, but which are not peculiar to Virginia alone. 

The school age is from seven to twenty and it is unreasonable and impracticable to expect every child in the State,black and white,to stay in school until he is twenty years old. 

This only shows the fallacy of practically all the statements in this letter, although without reflection or investigation then seem very plausible.
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