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A brief history of higher education in the United States
In the early history of the United States going to college was a rare phenomena. The first American college, Harvard, was founded in 1636 with the intention of training a few promising young puritan sons of the colony to serve as the next generation of ministers, magistrates and public officials. The early colleges were typically founded by religious communities to promote and maintain their particular religious perspective. Indeed, of the nine college founded in the American colonies before the Revolutionary War only the College of Philadelphia, which later became the University of Pennsylvania was not founded with an explicit mission to train ministers for a particular religious denomination. At the start of the Revolution there were only an estimated 750 college students out of nearly two million inhabitants of the American colonies of England.
Those who imagined themselves making a career in other professions than church minister or high government official typically apprenticed or went to practical school instead of the Latin schools which prepared students for college. These practical schools were something like a vocational high school emphasizing reading, writing and mathematics as necessary tools of business, providing training in the practical application of these skills to trades such as ship building, trading or farming and having little use for the classical education being provided in the Latin schools and colleges. For their part the Latin schools and colleges had little use for the practical lessons in English, arithmetic, bookkeeping or agricultural science being served up in the practical schools. (Good and Teller 1973)
As the country grew and prospered after the Revolutionary War a college degree became a status symbol for an emerging American elite. To polish the family name many a successful farmer or businessman would send of his son to be educated at Harvard, Yale or Princeton with no thought that this education was preparing him for a life of church or government service. Meanwhile the education available to prepare young men for professional life was also expanding rapidly. Law school, medical schools, engineering schools and schools in finance and accounting were growing along with the country. These professional schools were alternatives to college rather than courses of study you could take in a college or graduate programs you could enter after graduating from college. (Collins 1979) The first PhD was not awarded until Yale did so in 1861, awarding the degree to a chemist named Benjamin Silliman who had been taught by his father, a leading scientist and member of the Yale faculty. Graduate education didn?t truly arrive on this continent until John Hopkins University was founded in 1876. Organized on the model of a German research university it did not originally include a college but focused instead on preparing a few researchers to be leaders in science and medicine. (Good and Teller 1973)
For over 200 years following the founding of Harvard colleges in the United States were private institutions supported by churches and private benefactors. Started in the final decades of the 1800s there was a dramatic change as State colleges and universities were founded all across the country. The big change was the result the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862 also known as the Land Grant College Act. This act gave to each State 30,000 acres of public land per member of their congressional delegation which could be sold provided that the proceeds of this sale went, ??to the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the State may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life..?
With the resources of the Federal and State governments behind them over seventy land grant colleges and universities were established. While the act required that these institutions focus on the, ??practical education of the industrial classes..,? it allowed for these institutions of higher learning to also provide classical education along side more applied subjects. It is the particular wording of this act which has lead to the organization of modern American universities most commonly seen today. Seeing the financial resources being made available at the land grant colleges and universities, many supporters of the classical studies lobbied various State legislatures to ensure that these included departments where a student could classical languages, philosophy, theology and literature along side students pursuing engineering, agriculture or accounting.
With the resources to create large a large institution of higher learning, some of the States created flagship universities that could legitimately claim to offer the best of both the classical and practical educational traditions. At first the well established private universities considered these efforts at populist higher education to be of little concern. That complacent disregard didn?t last long once students started regularly choosing to decline an offer of admission at Harvard in favor of a place at the University of Michigan. It became apparent that for most of the higher education customers in this country a blend of learning about the great seminal works of our cultural history and learning how to succeed professionally in the modern world was appealing. In the end even Harvard had to adapt its curriculum to look more like the University of Michigan in order to remain competitive. (Collins 1979) And adapt it did, so fully embracing the notion of diverse departments teaching both practical and classical subjects side by side that by 1945 they could publish, without blushing, the Harvard Red Book which proclaimed the virtues of having a broad set of course requirements coupled with the selection of a major concentration from among a variety of fields of study. (Harvard 1945)
While the appearance of the Land Grant colleges and universities made college more affordable and more readily available than before, these institutions competed with but did not replace private colleges. This lack of one central model controlled by the government is what has allowed higher education in the United States to continue to thrive. With thousands of colleges looking for ways to attract and serve students there is plenty of incentive to try new and innovative strategies. Those ideas that do not successfully meet a recognized need are soon shut down for lack of students. Those strategies that succeed are soon copied by competing institutions. Harvard copies from the University of Michigan, Michigan copies from Harvard and neither is above copying from East Boondocks Junior College if that college comes up with a successful innovation. As a result, among the thousands of colleges, each with its own distinctive personality, programs and special features, there are a few basic models which have been widely copied.
References
Collins, Randall, Credential Society: A Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification, Academic Press 1979
Harvard University, General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1945
Good, Harry and James Teller, A History of American Education, New York:The Macmillan Company 1973
