What was the first chartered college in the us

Of them, Dr. Cora Smith King became the first woman to receive a medical license in the state of North Dakota, according to the university's website. Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, was founded in after the Ohio legislature approved a new act allowing the university to be established.

Ohio University first offered classes in , during which time the institution operated more like a high school than a college, according to the university's website.

In , after Ohio University was able to hire a team of higher-skilled faculty members, the school began to offer a traditional college program. The University of Central Oklahoma was founded in In November , the very first class of 23 students met in the Epworth League Room inside the unfurnished First Methodist Church, according to the school's website. Willamette University was established in as a missionary school. The university is one of the oldest coeducational colleges in the United States — the very first graduate of the university was a woman, and women were attending the School of Medicine as early as , according to the Willamette University website.

The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia dates back to when it was established as a charity school that would also house a place of worship for local people in Pennsylvania. It was the first American institute of higher learning to officially bear the name "university," according to the school. Brown University was founded in as the third college in New England and the seventh in America. Originally located in Warren, Rhode Island, it was the first Ivy League school to accept students from all religious affiliations, according to the school's website.

The College of Charleston was founded in and officially charted in , according to Britannica. The city of Charleston took control of the college in , making it the first municipal college in the nation. Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was founded in , though the university's roots were established as Hillsboro Academy, which was founded in The first class was held on September 1, , which coincides with the founding date of Augustana's sister-college, Augustana College, in Rock Island, Illinois.

In , the renamed Tusculum Academy officially adopted the name Tusculum College, according to the school's website. Travis wrote a letter to the New York Christian Advocate asking for a Methodist presence to be established in Texas, according to the school's website. The school claims to have been the site of many firsts , including the first homecoming on record and the first student literary journal in the state.

The first term began in November , during which time only male students were admitted. At the start of the second term, both men and women were allowed to attend. Nestled in the quaint town of Castleton, Vermont, Castleton University was founded in It is the 18th oldest institute of higher learning in the country , according to its website, and sits on a historic acre campus.

It is the second-oldest institute of higher learning in the US and has a lengthy list of esteemed and influential alumni members. The University of Washington in Seattle, originally named the Territorial University of Washington, is the oldest in the state — it was founded in Bethany College was founded in , though the town of Bethany dates back to By the time that West Virginia was recognized as a US state in , Bethany College was the only institute of higher learning in the state to offer collegiate degrees.

Carroll University was chartered in by the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature, two years before Wisconsin became a state. The school was originally established as an academy in by settlers living in the Wisconsin Territory community of Prairieville.

When the college first opened, the enrollment consisted of five students and two faculty members, Eleazar Root and John W. Sterling, according to the university's website. Hunter graduated with a degree in journalism and earned distinction during her career with two Emmys and a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcast journalism. In founding the college and in writing its charter, 18th century Georgia leaders created an institution that was a radical departure from the traditional concept of higher education.

Prior to , higher education was generally a luxury open only to the privileged sons of the wealthy; however, the Georgia Assemblymen had a better idea and one far more suited to the ideals of the new republic. They believed in the importance of an educated citizenry in maintaining a free government, that government had a responsibility to educate its citizens, and that all citizens had a right to an education, not just the wealthy.

Abraham Baldwin wrote these concepts into the college charter, which was approved by the Assembly on January 27, Of course, it would take another years before these ideals were fully realized, but in adopting this document with concepts that departed so radically from the traditional notion of higher education, Georgia established the framework for what would become the American system of public supported colleges and universities.

Linda Bennett Pennell is an author of historical fiction set in the American South or about Southerners traveling far from home. While she writes about the land of her birth, anything with a history, whether shabby or regal, ancient or closer to our own day, has fascinated her since early childhood.

This love of the past and the desire to create stories of it probably owes much to her Southern roots. Southern families are filled with storytellers who keep family and community histories alive. It is in their blood and part of their birthright. And most important of all, most of those stories were true. Click here to connect with Linda and find out more about her writing.

I love learning about how colleges and universities came into being, and what their higher purpose was. Nice job, Linda. Like Liked by 1 person. Thank you, Becky! It is amazing when we consider how devoted to education people who lived in basically agricultural states were at that time. They were farsighted indeed!

Like Like. It was also the first university to allow women and African-Americans into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill didn't begin enrolling students until , but it is still one of the oldest public universities in the U.

Many future members of government attended the University, including a U. Georgetown is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit college in the country. Castleton is a small university in Vermont that emphasizes undergraduate liberal arts and professional studies, and also offers graduate programs. They are known for small classes with a growing international population for a lot of diversity. It was the first bilingual college in the U. Back in , the University of Pittsburgh was known as Pittsburgh Academy and was an actual log cabin that acted as a prep school.

It obviously expanded as the years went on, and is now a state-related research university. In , Georgia became the first state to charter a state-supported university, making the University of Georgia one of the oldest public universities in the U. Many notable alumni have graced the halls, from government officials to Emmy and Grammy winners, writers, scholars, poets, and more.

Old Main, pictured here, is one of the most prominent buildings on campus. Affectionately known as Transy, this was the first university in Kentucky, although it actually began in an area that was once known as Virginia. Two U. Presidents have graduated from the school. Hampden-Sydney, a men's liberal arts college, was the last American college founded in British Colonial America and the last college founded before the American Declaration of Independence was signed.

It is now one of only three men's-only liberal arts colleges in the U. Dickinson College was originally known as the Carlisle Grammar School and was founded in and charted in , six days after the Revolutionary War ended. Because of this, Dickinson became the first college chartered in the new United States. Salem College is the oldest educational institution for girls and women in the U. It was founded in by Sister Elisabeth Oesterlein as a boarding school.

In , it was renamed Salem Female Academy, and in , it began offering college degrees. The College of Charleston is known as the oldest educational institution south of Virginia, and was founded in a time when only wealthy families sent their sons to college. It's also the oldest college in South Carolina.

Today, Dartmouth is a private Ivy League university, but when it was established in , it was meant to be a school that educated Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life.

It eventually evolved to become one of the most prestigious schools in the country. In , Rutgers was charted as an all-male school and was known as Queen's College. In , Brown became the first college in the U. In , they started allowing women into the school. It was also one of the doctoral-granting colleges in the country.

Back in , Columbia University was called King's College. It was renamed Columbia in after the American Revolution, and is the oldest college in New York. The school has many notable alumni, including Alexander Hamilton, Robert R. The colonial colleges' legacy then was producing a generation of American leaders and thinkers whose combination of decisiveness and thoughtfulness literally turned the world "upside down. With the founding of the United States of America, governmental policies towards English-chartered colleges became unclear.

Wary of centralized power, Americans maintained educational control close to home. Therefore, governance of colonial colleges became almost exclusively the jurisdiction of local and state governments. In actuality the schools enjoyed independence as the Supreme Court's famous Dartmouth decision in demonstrated that the new federal government would protect colleges from state intervention.

With the reputation of colleges remaining high, most state legislatures, particularly in the newer states west of the Allegheny and Appalachian mountain ranges, looked favorably on chartering colleges as long as the state did not have to provide financial support.

Between and , the United States experienced a "college building boom" in which more than two hundred degree-granting institutions were created. However, since most of these new colleges depended on student tuition payments and local donors, there was also a high closure rate and the schools that did survive typically struggled from year to year. Although the classical languages and liberal studies of the bachelor of arts degree remained central to the character of American higher education in this era, several new fields gained a foothold in formal study.

Engineering and science acquired a presence on the campus. Professional education for law and medicine usually also took place though in separate institutions. Nevertheless, few if any learned professions in the early nineteenth century required academic degrees or certification.

Most states reserved the right to set requirements for professional practice, and these were for the most part meager. Going to college early in the nineteenth century was not particularly expensive. The cost of potential lost opportunities presented a greater concern for students and parents.

Employers seldom required college degrees, therefore college presidents faced the perpetual challenge of persuading young adults to delay pursuing their life's enterprises by spending four years on campus. Modest-income families decided whether or not a young man's potential contribution to family labor could be spared while he pursued higher education.

The college experience and the college degree did confer prestige and often some professional advantages, but its perceived benefits did not always outweigh the costs. The United States, for all its deserved acclaim of being a truly "new nation," remained faithful to many of the tenets of English common law. For example, in New England states, the small farms and principle of primogeniture forbade the division of a father's land among numerous sons, so families had to find useful work for those sons not inheriting land.

Going to college provided an attractive alternative, especially in subsistence-farming regions. Affordable colleges in rural New England provided an important route to respect and employment in schools and churches.

In fact, with the onset of the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, new denominations once again pushed for clergy educated in institutions dedicated to their particulars of faith. Their "missionary zeal" led to the founding of new schools and an increase in college attendance. In short, college became useful not just for the elite, but also for sons who had fewer prospects in the new nation. This development resulted in a host of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast and later in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee that served as an important incubator for a growing middle class.

Educational opportunities for young women followed a comparable pattern. Families often wondered how a young single woman could be self-supporting or contribute to the family welfare. A growing national demand for trained teachers due to the "common-school movement" of the s provided one answer. Women could achieve financial independence and respectability within a rather rigid social structure by attending a normal school or female seminary that provided them with an education for employment as teachers in the ever-expanding nation.

The mid-nineteenth century. Variety and growth characterized college building during the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to the conspicuous church-related liberal arts colleges, various groups founded a range of other special interest institutions for advanced study. These included agricultural colleges, proprietary medical schools, freestanding law schools, engineering schools, and scientific colleges.

Private philanthropy indicated a growing American interest in founding new institutions concentrated on advanced scientific, technical, and engineering education. Illustrative of this realm was the generous support for such colleges as Rensselaer, Drexel, Cooper Union, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the biggest shifts was the federal government becoming directly involved in higher education, which developed during the Civil War when southern congressmen who opposed the legislation were absent.

The Morrill Act of set in motion an elaborate program whereby states received profits from the sale of an allotted portion of western lands if used to establish programs of agricultural, mechanical, and military sciences, along with liberal arts. The so-called land-grant act thereby stimulated numerous creative proposals and projects. In some cases, states attached their new engineering or agricultural programs to historic colleges. In others, they opted to create new state colleges.

Between and , the land-grant colleges gained support and collective political strength and expanded the definition and scope of university curricula. Legislation such as the Hatch Act and the "Second Morrill Act" of continued the expansion of federal involvement in education by bringing federal funding and projects to the new land-grant campuses.

Amidst this flurry of federal legislation, African Americans also received attention though the treatment tended to have mixed results. On the one hand, the Morrill Act of provided funding for African-American education, which led to the creation of Negro colleges in seventeen southern states—a substantial gain in educational opportunities. On the other hand, the guidelines meant that the U. By increasing their role in funding higher education, the federal government helped shift the focus of many American colleges.

Higher education's gilded age: to Between and nearly all institutions of higher education enjoyed a surge in appeal both to prospective students and to benefactors. Some historians have called this period the "Age of the University. The university ideal certainly took root and blossomed during this period, but the historic undergraduate college also enjoyed growth, support, and popularity.

Because of an unprecedented era of commercial and industrial expansion, a new period of philanthropy made possible the founding of well-endowed universities.

One enduring sign of this growth came in when the presidents of fourteen institutions created the Association of American Universities. Gradually, over the next decades, relatively young state universities in the Midwest, along with private institutions such as Brown, Northwestern, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Vanderbilt, would also gain recognition and "university" status for their acceptance into the Association of American Universities.

The creation of the Association of American Universities reinvigorated an ongoing and intense debate over the proper definition and role of a modern American university. Nevertheless, without any official consensus, some general patterns of practice and aspiration stood out.

The new modern university emphasized graduate programs, including the study for and conferral of the doctor of philosophy degree or Ph. In fact, the proliferation of varied degree programs connected with professions illustrated a new era in higher education. Many undergraduate programs in agriculture, engineering, business, education, and home economics, along with military training, challenged the old definition of collegiate studies.

Medicine, law, and theology, three traditional professions, developed varying relationships with universities and academic standards. A lack of national academic standards, especially among secondary schools, colleges, and universities, gave rise to the entrance of private agencies into the higher education arena. Such organizations as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Rockefeller General Education Board adjudicated ratings among American universities.

The foundation directors used a combination of coercion and incentives to prompt universities, including professional schools, to adhere to reasonable criteria of admissions, instruction, and certification. On balance, the foundations probably acknowledged and promoted those universities that were already reasonably strong and sound, and raised the floor for others. Much to the chagrin of "serious scholars," students shaped the undergraduate world according to their own preferences.

It was in the elaborate extracurricular experiences of intercollegiate sports, campus newspapers, collegiate drama, literary societies, alumni groups, and fraternities that students reveled. Student and public enthusiasm for these activities grew as the popular media glamorized the social activities rather than scholarly pursuits.

Although the new structure and ethos of the "university" gained attention for its innovation, equally important was the support for and interest in smaller liberal arts colleges. This rising tide for colleges included an extended boom for the founding of women's colleges. Mount Holyoke Seminary in western Massachusetts transformed itself into a bachelor's degree-granting institution.

Women also gained access via new coeducational institutions such as the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and many state colleges and universities in the Midwest and the West. Higher education between the world wars. Between and the American campus displayed some flexibility to accommodate special programs for the domestic effort during World War I. It included special training programs for military personnel and sporadic but important instances of faculty research leading to direct inventions and innovations in warfare.

Projects such as future Harvard president James B. Conant's efforts to develop mustard gas foreshadowed even greater cooperation between the universities and federal government during World War II. College enrollments and public enthusiasm surged after World War I. One indicator of this popularity was the proliferation of huge football stadiums—most of which were named "Memorial Field.

Although popular since the s, intercollegiate athletics soared in commercial appeal during the s. The absence of any substantive national voluntary self-regulation led the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to publish a highly visible expose of college sports' excesses in Some university officials denied the report's findings, but the Carnegie Study was timely and accurate.

The abuses in college sports underscored what Abraham Flexner of the Carnegie Foundation identified as the root source of problems in American higher education: a lack of consensus on clarity of mission and purpose. Unfortunately for Flexner and his colleagues, too many colleges and their constituencies were well served by the amorphous, unregulated nature of American higher education.

What was intended as a marketplace of ideas became simply a marketplace, in which students were consumers and sports was the best-seller. The onset of the Great Depression illustrated an interesting phenomenon: college enrollments increased during times of national financial hardship.