Colonial colleges Information

The colonial colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the Thirteen Colonies before the United States of America became a sovereign nation after the American Revolution. These nine have long been considered together, notably in the survey of their origins in the 1907 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Seven of the nine colonial colleges are part of the Ivy League athletic conference: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania (Penn), Brown, and Dartmouth. (The eighth member of the Ivy League, Cornell, was founded in 1865.)

The two colonial colleges not in the Ivy League are now both public universities — The College of William and Mary in Virginia and Rutgers University in New Jersey. William and Mary was a royal charter institution from 1693 until the American Revolution. Between the Revolution and the American Civil War, William and Mary was a private institution. It suffered significant damage during the Civil War and began to receive public support in the 1880s. William and Mary officially became a public college in 1906. Rutgers was founded as Queens College, named for Queen Charlotte, and was for much of its history privately affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. It became "The State University of New Jersey" after World War II.

Seven of the nine colonial colleges began their histories as institutions of higher learning de novo (i.e., with no predecessor parent organization). Dartmouth College began operating in 1768 as the collegiate department of Moors Charity School, a secondary school started in 1754 by Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock. Dartmouth considers its founding date to be 1769, when it was granted a collegiate charter. The University of Pennsylvania began operating in 1751 as a secondary school, the Academy of Philadelphia, and added an institution of higher education in 1755 with the granting of a charter to the College of Philadelphia.

Several other colleges and universities can be traced to colonial-era "academies" or "schools", but are not considered colonial colleges because they were not formally chartered as colleges with degree-granting powers until after the formation of the United States in 1776. Listed below are the founding dates of the schools which served as predecessor entities and the years in which they were chartered to operate an institution of higher learning.

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