History of higher education in the United States
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.
[1] The College of William & 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.
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 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.
Students were drilled in Greek, Latin, geometry, ancient history, logic, ethics and rhetoric, with few discussions and no lab sessions.
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.
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.
Summarizing the research of Burke and Hall, Katz concludes that in the 19th century:[18] Many American scholars and scientists studied at German universities before 1914.
They returned with PhDs and built research-oriented universities based on the German model, such as Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Chicago and Stanford, and upgraded established schools like Harvard, Columbia and Wisconsin.
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.
Most "Historically black colleges and universities" (HBCUs) were established in the South with the assistance of religious missionary organizations based in the northern United States.
[39][40] African American studies bloomed in colleges during the black power protests and changing cultural views which created a different campus experience.
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.
These colleges made important contributions to rural development, including the establishment of a traveling school program by the Tuskegee Institute in 1906.
This began to change in the mid-19th century, as thousands of the more ambitious scholars at major schools went to Germany for one to three years to obtain a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in the sciences or the humanities.
By the 1890s, Harvard, Columbia, Michigan and Wisconsin were building major graduate programs; their alumni were in strong demand at aspiring universities.
After World War II, state universities across the country expanded greatly in undergraduate enrollment, and eagerly added research programs leading to master's or doctorate degrees.
Students, parents and businessmen wanted nearby, low-cost schools to provide training for the growing white-collar labor force, as well as for more advanced technical jobs in the blue collar sphere.
Community colleges continue as open enrollment, low-cost institutions with a strong component of vocational education, as well as a lower-cost preparation for transfer students into four-year schools.
The endowment investments shrank, fewer parents could pay full tuition, and annual giving from alumni and philanthropy fell from $870,000 in 1932 to a low of $331,000 in 1935.
However, the movement toward state certification of school teachers enabled Northwestern to open up a new graduate program in education, bringing in a new clientele.
That included a fieldhouse, a natural history museum, new wings for the college of arts and sciences, a faculty club, a small library and a new hospital.
He collaborated with Frederick L. Hovde, the president of IU's cross state rival, Purdue; together they approached the Indiana delegation to Congress, indicating their highest priorities.
In 1942, Wells reported that "The past five years have been the greatest single period of expansion in the physical plant of the university in its entire history.
[68] However, relief agencies such as WPA and PWA were in the construction business, and work closely with local and state government which sometimes included new buildings and athletic facilities for public universities.
[69] Eager to avoid a repeat of the highly controversial debates over a postwar years and then the bonus to veterans of the first World War, Congress in 1944 passed the G.I.
[72] As of 2016, some for profit colleges have been sanctioned by federal agencies for preying on vulnerable populations who accrue massive student loan debt in the course of earning a degree that has less value than those obtained from public or private institutions of higher learning.
[77] 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.
