The story of higher education in the United States begins with Harvard College and continues to the present time. For recent trends see the article Higher education in the United States.
Religious denominations established most early colleges in order to train ministers. They were modeled after Oxford and Cambridge universities in England, as well as Scottish universities. Harvard College was founded by the Massachusetts Bay colonial legislature in 1636, and named after an early benefactor. Most of the funding came from the colony, but the colleges began to collect endowments early on. Harvard first focused on training young men for the ministry, and won general support from the Puritan government, some of whose leaders had attended either Oxford or Cambridge. The College of William and Mary was founded by the Virginia government in 1693, with 20,000 acres (81 km2) of land for an endowment, and a penny tax on every pound of tobacco, together with an annual appropriation. James Blair, the leading Church of England minister in the colony, was president for 50 years, and the college won the broad support of the Virginia gentry. It trained many of the lawyers, politicians, and leading planters at the time.Yale College was founded in 1701, and in 1716 was relocated to New Haven, Connecticut. The conservative Puritan ministers of Connecticut had grown dissatisfied with the more liberal theology of Harvard, and wanted their own school to train orthodox ministers.
New Light Presbyterians in 1747 set up the College of New Jersey, in the town of Princeton; it was later renamed Princeton University in 1896. In New York City, the Church of England set up Kings College by royal charter in 1746, with its president Doctor Samuel Johnson the only teacher. Following the American Revolutionary War, the tory administration of the college was overthrown and it was renamed Columbia College in 1784. Rhode Island College was founded by Baptists in 1764, and in 1804 it was renamed Brown University in honor of a benefactor. Brown was especially liberal in welcoming young men from other denominations. The Academy of Pennsylvania, a secondary school, was founded in 1749 by Benjamin Franklin and other civic minded leaders in Philadelphia. In 1755, it received its charter, was renamed College of Philadelphia, and was converted into an institution of higher education. Unlike the other universities, it was not oriented towards the training of ministers. It was renamed the University of Pennsylvania in 1791. The Dutch Reformed Church in 1766 set up Queens College in New Jersey, which later became Rutgers University. Dartmouth College, chartered in 1769, moved to its present site in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1770.
In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder documented the history of early higher education in the US, including the oppression of indigenous people and enslaved Africans at elite colleges. Brown University, Harvard, Dartmouth, William and Mary, University of Virginia, Georgetown University, University of Alabama, University of South Carolina, Clemson University and Rutgers University held enslaved people—and relied on captives to operate.
Most Protestant, as well as Catholic, denominations opened small colleges in the nineteenth century, mostly after 1850. Nearly all taught in the English language, although there were a few German language seminaries and colleges.
While colleges were springing up across the Northeast, there was little competition on the western frontier for Transylvania University, founded in Lexington, Kentucky in 1780. In addition to its undergraduate program, it boasted law and medical programs. It attracted politically ambitious young men from across the Southwest including 50 who became United States senators, 101 congressmen, 36 governors and 34 ambassadors, as well as Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Many of the colleges started at this time were funded by churches and denominations, instructing pastors and teachers. It wasnt until the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 that public colleges and universities were started in the Midwest, including many of the first public HBCUs
All the schools were small, with a limited undergraduate curriculum based on the liberal arts. Students were drilled in Greek, Latin, geometry, ancient history, logic, ethics and rhetoric, with few discussions and no lab sessions. Originality and creativity were not prized, but exact repetition was rewarded. The college president typically enforced strict discipline, and the upperclassman enjoyed hazing the freshman. Many students were younger than 17, and most of the colleges concurrently operated a preparatory school. There were no organized sports or Greek-letter fraternities, but literary societies were active. Tuition was very low and scholarships were few. Many of the students were sons of clergymen; most planned professional careers as ministers, lawyers or teachers.
By the 1820s there was a growing demand to replace Greek and Latin with modern languages, as had been proposed by Jeffersonians at the University of Virginia and the newly opened University of the City of New York. The Yale Report of 1828 was a defense of the Latin and Greek curriculum. It called to maintain traditions, especially against the forceful reputation of the German research universities that were starting to attract young American postgraduate scholars. Most critics viewed it as a reactionary move, although Pak Depicted in terms of attracting students from the growing number of private academies that continued to stress the classic languages. The reformers failed, and the classical languages continued as the centerpiece of the rigid traditional curriculum until after the Civil War. For example, at East Alabama Male College, a small Methodist school was founded in 1856 with a curriculum centered on Latin, Greek, and moral science; it resembled most other antebellum Southern colleges. It closed during the Civil War and reopened as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, becoming the states land-grant institution. While retaining some of the antebellum classical curriculum to accommodate the returning faculty, it added new courses in agricultural and industrial arts, as well as applied sciences. It became Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1899, and is now known as Auburn University.
Summarizing the research of Burke and Hall, Katz concludes that in the 19th century:
There were no schools of law in the early British colonies. Thus no schools of law were in America during the colonial times. A few lawyers studied at the highly prestigious Inns of Court in London, while the majority served apprenticeships with established American lawyers. Law was very well established in the colonies, compared to medicine, which was in a more rudimentary condition. In the 18th century, 117 Americans had graduated in medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland, but most physicians in the colonies learned as apprentices. In Philadelphia, the Medical College of Philadelphia was founded in 1765, and became affiliated with the university in 1791. In New York, the medical department of Kings College was established in 1767, and in 1770 awarded the first American M.D. degree. It is now Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
On the frontier after 1799, medical professionalism and medical education was heavily influenced by the medical program at Transylvania University in Kentucky, which graduated 8000 doctors by 1860.
Mary Lyon (1797-1849) founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837; it was the first college opened for women and is now Mount Holyoke College, one of the Seven Sisters. Lyon was a deeply religious Congregationalist who, although not a minister, preached revivals at her school. She greatly admired colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards for his theology and his ideals of self-restraint, self-denial, and disinterested benevolence. Georgia Female College, now Wesleyan College opened in 1839 as the first Southern college for women.
Oberlin College opened in 1833 as Oberlin Collegiate Institute, in the heavily Yankee northeastern corner of Ohio. In 1837, it became the first coeducational college by admitting four women. Soon they were fully integrated into the college, and comprised from a third to half of the student body. The religious founders especially evangelical theologian Charles Grandison Finney, saw women as morally superior to men. Indeed, many alumnae, inspired by this sense of superiority and their personal duty to fulfill Gods mission engaged in missionary work. Historians have typically presented coeducation at Oberlin as an enlightened societal development presaging the future evolution of the ideal of equality for women in higher education Intensely anti-slavery, Oberlin was the only college to admit black students in the 1830s. By the 1880s, however, with the fading of evangelical idealism, the school began segregating its black students.
The enrollment of women grew steadily after the Civil War. In 1870, 9,100 women comprised 21% of all college students. In 1930, 481,000 women comprised 44% of the student body.
Local wealthy families supported local schools, especially of their religious denomination, often by donating land. Wealthy philanthropists for example, established Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Vanderbilt University and Duke University. John D. Rockefeller funded the University of Chicago without imposing his name on it.
Protestant denominations set up funds that by 1830 subsidized about a fourth of the prospective ministers then in college. The American Education Society, founded in 1815, raised funds from local Protestant churches to support their students. Furthermore, it aided academies, colleges, and seminaries and helped to maintain high academic standards. It was a champion of the classical curriculum against the demands for more modern skills.
Each state used federal funding from the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Acts of 1862 and 1890 to set up "land grant colleges" that specialized in agriculture and engineering.
Among the first were Iowa State University, in Iowa, Purdue University in Indiana, Michigan State University, Kansas State University, Cornell University (in New York), Texas AandM University, Pennsylvania State University, The Ohio State University and the University of California. Few alumni became farmers, but they did play an increasingly important role in the larger food industry, especially after the Extension system was set up in 1916 that put trained agronomists in every agricultural county.
The engineering graduates played a major role in rapid technological development. Indeed, the land-grant college system produced the agricultural scientists and industrial engineers who constituted the critical human resources of the managerial revolution in government and business (1862–1917) laying the foundation of the worlds preeminent educational infrastructure that supported the worlds foremost technology-based economy.
Pennsylvania State University is a good example of this. The Farmers High School of Pennsylvania (later the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania and then Pennsylvania State University), chartered in 1855, was intended to uphold declining agrarian values and show farmers ways to prosper through more productive farming. Students were to build character and meet a part of their expenses by performing agricultural labor. By 1875, the compulsory labor requirement was dropped, but male students were to have an hour per day of military training in order to meet the requirements of the Morrill Land Grant College Act. In the early years the agricultural curriculum was not well developed, and politicians in Harrisburg often considered it a costly and useless experiment. The college was a center of middle-class values that served to help young people on their journey to white-collar occupations.
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