History of higher education in the United States

The History 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.

Colonial era

Religious denominations established most early colleges in order to train ministers. They were modeled after Oxford and Cambridge universities. Harvard College was founded by the colonial legislature in 1636, and named after an early benefactor. Most of the funding came from the colony, but the college early began to collect endowment. Harvard at first focused on training young men for the ministry, and won general support from the Puritan government, some of whose leaders had attended Oxford or Cambridge. The College of William & Mary was founded by 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. 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; much later it was renamed Princeton University. Rhode Island College was begun by the 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. In New York City, the Church of England set up King's College by royal charter in 1746, with its president Doctor Samuel Johnson the only teacher. It closed during the American Revolution, and reopened in 1784 under the name of Columbia College; it is now Columbia University. The Academy of Pennsylvania was created in 1749 by Benjamin Franklin and other civic minded leaders in Philadelphia, and unlike the others was not oriented toward the training of ministers. It was renamed the University of Pennsylvania in 1791. The Dutch Reformed Church in 1766 set up Queen's College in New Jersey, which later became Rutgers University. Dartmouth College, chartered in 1769, was originally meant to educate Native Americans, and was soon moved to its present site in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1770.

Nineteenth century

Many Protestant denominations, as well as the Catholics, open small colleges in the nineteenth century. The Catholics, especially, opened a number of women's colleges in the early twentieth century.

All of 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 also 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 their students were sons of clergymen; most planned professional careers as ministers, lawyers or teachers.

Impact of 19th-century colleges

Summarizing the research of Burke and Hall, Katz concludes that in the 19th century:.

1. The nation's many small colleges helped young men make the transition from rural farms to complex urban occupations.
2. These colleges especially promoted upward mobility by preparing ministers and thereby provided towns across the country with a core of community leaders.
3. The more elite colleges became increasingly exclusive and contributed relatively little to upward social mobility. By concentrating on the offspring of wealthy families, ministers and a few others, the elite Eastern colleges, especially Harvard, played an important role in the formation of a Northeastern elite with great power.

Law and medical schools

There were no schools of law in the early British colonies, thus no schools of law were in America in 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 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 King's College was established in 1767, and in 1770 awarded the first American M.D. degree.

Philanthropy

Philanthropists endowed many of elite institutions, And local wealthy families supported local schools, especially of their religious denomination. 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.

Land Grant universities

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 Purdue University in Indiana, Michigan State University, Kansas State University, Cornell University (in New York), Texas A&M 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 world's pre-eminent educational infrastructure that supported the world's foremost technology-based economy.

Representative was Pennsylvania State University. 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 a 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.

Black land grant universities

The 1890 act created all-black land grant colleges, which were dedicated primarily to teacher training. They also made important contributions to rural development, including the establishment of a traveling school program by Tuskegee Institute in 1906. Rural conferences sponsored by Tuskegee also attempted to improve the life of rural blacks. In recent years, the 1890 schools have helped train many students from less-developed countries who return home with the ability to improve agricultural production.

Twentieth century

At the beginning of the 20th century, fewer than 1,000 colleges with 160,000 students existed in the United States. explosive growth in the number of colleges occurred In bursts, especially 1900-1930, in 1950-1970. State universities grew from small institutions of fewer than 1000 students to gigantic campuses with 40,000 more students, as well as a network of regional campuses around the state. In turn the regional campuses broke away and became separate universities. To handle the explosive growth of K-12 education, every state set up a network of teachers colleges, beginning with Massachusetts in 1830s. After 1950 they became state colleges and then state universities With a broad curriculum.

Major new trends included the development of the junior colleges. They were usually set up by City school systems starting in the 1920s. By the 1960s they were renamed as "community colleges." They continue as open enrollment, low-cost institutions with a strong component of vocational education, as well as a low-cost preparation for transfer students into four-year schools. They appeal to a poorer, older, less prepared element.

GI Bill

Rejecting liberal calls for large-scale aid to education, Congress in 1944 passed the conservative program of aid limited to veterans who had served in wartime. The GI Bill made college education possible for millions by paying tuition and living expenses. The government provided between $800 and $1,400 each year to these veterans as a subsidy to attend college, which covered 50-80% of total costs. This included foregone earnings in addition to tuition, which allowed them to have enough funds for life outside of school. The GI Bill helped create a widespread belief in the necessity of college education. It opened up higher education to ambitious young men who would otherwise have been forced to immediately enter the job market. When comparing college attendance rates between veterans and non-veterans during this period, veterans were around 10% more likely to go to college than non-veterans. Most campuses became overwhelmingly male thanks to the GI Bill, since few women were covered, However by 2000 women had reached parity in numbers and began passing men in rates of college and graduate school attendance.

Great Society

When liberals regained control of Congress in 1964 they passed numerous Great Society programs that greatly expanded federal support for education. The Higher Education Act of 1965 set up federal scholarships and low-interest loans for college students, and subsidized better academic libraries, ten to twenty new graduate centers, several new technical institutes, classrooms for several hundred thousand students, and twenty-five to thirty new community colleges a year. A separate education bill enacted that same year provided similar assistance to dental and medical schools.

For-profit universities

A major development of the late twentieth century was the emergence on a very large scale of the for-profit higher education institutions. They appeal to low income students, who can borrow money from the federal government to pay the tuition. and to veterans who receive tuition money as part of their enlistment bonus. They have become very controversial in the 21st century, because of the high proportion of students who fail to graduate Who do graduate and failed to get good jobs; many default on repayment of their federal loans. Federal and state officials started cracking down on the for-profits, and some have gone out of business.

Roman Catholic colleges and universities

Main article: History of Catholic education in the United States § Colleges and universities

The first Catholic college in the United States was Georgetown University, founded in Georgetown ( now Washington DC) in xx.

Urban dioceses around the country founded numerous colleges for women in the early twentieth century; many have merged or closed in recent years.

The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities was founded in 1899 and continues to facilitate the exchange of information and methods. Vigorous debate in recent decades has focused on how to balance Catholic and academic roles, with conservatives arguing that bishops should exert more control to guarantee orthodoxy.

Further reading

• Barrow, Clyde W. Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928, University of Wisconsin Press 1990
• Bogue, E. Grady and Aper, Jeffrey. Exploring the Heritage of American Higher Education: The Evolution of Philosophy and Policy. Oryx, 2000. 272 pp.
• Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
• Cohen, Arthur M. (1998). The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Eisenmann, Linda. Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965. Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2006. 304 pp.
• Faragher, John Mack and Howe, Florence, ed. Women and Higher Education in American History. Norton, 1988. 220 pp.
• Frye, John H. The Vision of the Public Junior College, 1900–1940: Professional Goals and Popular Aspirations. Greenwood, 1992. 163 pp.
• Geiger, Roger L. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (Princeton UP 2014), 584pp; encyclopedic in scope
• Geiger, Roger L., ed. The American College in the Nineteenth Century. Vanderbilt University Press. (2000). online review
• Geiger, Roger L. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940. Oxford University Press. (1986).
• Geiger, Roger L. Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II. Oxford University Press. (2001).
• Gleason, Philip. Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. Oxford U. Press, 1995. 434 pp.
• Gould, Jon B. How to Succeed in College (While Really Trying). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 192 pp. excerpt
• Horowitz, Helen L. Campus life: Undergraduate cultures from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. (1987).
• Jarausch, Konrad H., ed. The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860–1930. U. of Chicago Press, 1983. 375 pp.
• Kerr, Clark. The Great Transformation in Higher Education, 1960–1980. State U. of New York Press, 1991. 383 pp.
• Leahy, William P. Adapting to America: Catholics, Jesuits, and Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. Georgetown U. Press, 1991. 187 pp.
• Levine, D. O. The American college and the culture of aspiration, 1915–1940. (1986).
• Lucas, C. J. American higher education: A history. (1994).
• Robson, David W. Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750–1800. Greenwood, 1985. 272 pp.
• Ruben, Julie. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. University Of Chicago Press. (1996).
• Rudolph, Frederick. The American College and University: A History (1991), a standard survey
• Thelin, John R. A History of American Higher Education. Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2004. 421 pp.
• Veysey Lawrence R. The emergence of the American university. (1965).

Primary sources

• Cohen, Sol, ed. Education In the United States: A Documentary History (5 vol, 1974), 3600 pp of primary sources from origins to 1972
• Hofstadter, Richard and Wilson Smith, eds. American Higher Education: A Documentary History (2 vol 1967); especially strong an academic freedom
• Ihle, Elizabeth L., ed. Black Women in Higher Education: An Anthology of Essays, Studies, and Documents. (Garland, 1992). 341 pp.
• Knight, Edgar W., ed. A Documentary History of Education in the South Before 1860 (5 vol 1952)
• Willis, George, Robert V. Bullough, and John T. Holton, eds. The American Curriculum: A Documentary History (1992)