Running Head: WHO GOES TO COLLEGE 1

Who Goes to College:

The Federal Government’s Role in Creating, Expanding, and Ensuring Access to Higher
Education in the United States
Randall Cloke
Salem State University
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Higher education in the United States has long been a part of the nation’s cultural fabric.

Not long after European colonizing forces came to the Mid-Atlantic coast, the first institution of

higher learning, Harvard, would be founded as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter.

Soon after that, William and Mary would join the ranks of colonial colleges. From there, it has

only grown.

Growth in United States’ higher education is evident in nearly every possible data point

one could consider. The number of institutions has certainly skyrocketed since the Colonial Era;

the breadth of available educational degrees has grown; the cost of obtaining a college education

has certainly increased.

But, perhaps most importantly, the availability of access for more people—people

different from the first collegegoers—to higher education is much different today than it was in

the Colonial Era. It has certainly increased; this is certain. However, the nation has long

struggled with who should go to college.

“Who goes to college” had a very particular answer during the United States’ Colonial

Era. Over the course of the several hundred years since Harvard’s charter, the answer to that

question has changed dramatically, though not without difficulty, strain, and challenge. That

change has been largely due to numerous actions of various levels of government. Specifically,

monumental shifts in access to higher education came by way of federal and state legislation

with the creation of Land-Grant colleges and normal schools in the nineteenth century.

The Colonial Era

To put the later governmental actions into perspective, one must have a baseline of

knowledge of who went to college before those actions took place. Given the first colleges’
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respective beginnings in the Colonial Era, it is helpful to look at who was a college student in

this time period.

To go to college in the Colonial Era required one to meet one of several criteria, largely

speaking. The primary collegegoer in this time would have been, in some order, male, white,

wealthy, and religious. When colonists arrived in Massachusetts Bay, the climate differences

made settlement all that more difficult, and economic issues arose in the early period of the

colony. As such, “few families could afford the loss of an able-bodied young man from the

family farm or business” (Thelin, 2011, p. 24).

The economics of the new colony played a very large role in creating a social strata.

Having fled persecution from the English crown, it did not take very long for a new society of

class divisions to emerge. And the separations in the newly-created social sphere extended to

higher education, as “The college was a conservative institution that was essential to transmitting

a relatively fixed social order” (Thelin, 2011, p. 25).

Higher education in the Colonial Era was for the education and advancement of those at

the given social order. Few non-wealthy families could afford to send their sons to college, and

fewer still could withstand the combined cost of the tuition and loss of the son’s productivity and

contribution to the family’s finances. So, only white young men from wealth were able to, more

easily, attend college. But an even closer look at the time period adds a winkle to understanding

who went to college in the Colonial Era.

Early Colonial colleges, like Harvard and William and Mary, educated more than just

white, wealthy men. In addition to this group, the colleges also educated sons of Native

American families. Wright, in “For the Children of Infidels” (1988) even asserts that

“Indians…offered the impetus for establishing and maintaining among the nation’s most
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enduring and prestigious halls of higher learning—such…as Harvard College, [and] the College

of William and Mary” (Wright, 1988, p. 2). Given the context of the social classes created in the

early Massachusetts colony, this could be surprising. However, it is clear that the education

provided by these early colleges for Native sons shows that the educational goal was to further

entrench the social order.

One major component of early Colonial culture was the importance of religion. Most of

those in Massachusetts Bay Colony were getting away from the religious persecution of the

crown, but their beliefs, they thought, were right and just, and thus should spread to all of those

who did not believe as they did. The Native Americans did not share the same religious belief

system, and so attempts at conversion began.

Though this included skirmishes and battles and violence, conversion also included

education, and higher education played a role, too. Harvard’s charter is rather clear about its aims

in whom they would educate and what would be taught. Including provisions about physical

space and other such needs, the charter states that “…the education of the English and Indian

youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness…” (Harvard library, n.d.)

Who goes to college? In the Colonial Era, it was wealthy, white men who would be a part

of and reinforce a social order. But, in small instances, collegegoers also included sons of Native

American families. Their education was also to reinforce a social order. The difference, however,

was that they were educated to convert their religious beliefs, thus ostracizing and marginalizing

native peoples from the elite of the colonizing forces.

But who went to college would not always remain this way, as governmental acts at

various levels would provide for a larger base of students whose identities and financial means

stretch beyond the wealthy, white men of the colonial era.

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Morril Act of 1862

The Morril Act of 1862 is federal legislation that was signed into law and saw the

government give a number of states federal land. Though not explicitly for chartering flagship

state college campuses, the Morril Act nonetheless gave rise to flagship state universities in

many states, which are often the largest and most prolific degree-granting institutions in the

United States today.

What makes this legislation and the resulting colleges important, however, is whom they

would serve and what they would teach to students. Unlike founding colleges’ religiously-

motivated education, and their ultimate goal of creating an elite class and enforcing a social

order, the programs offered by these land grant colleges was markedly different; so, too, were

many of the students who would go on to study at them.

The programs offered at these schools were largely different from colonial colleges and

the elite institutions common at the time. Instead of a liberal or classic arts education, these

schools offered learning in “…agriculture, mechanics, mining, and military instruction…”

(Thelin, 2011, p. 76). While not enabling the same types of careers reserved for only those at the

top of the social order, these degrees offered greater understanding of jobs and tasks both

necessary and valued in the Westward Expansion Era. Many schools, given their offerings in

agriculture and mechanics, often were designated with “A&M.”

That is not to say that the change in who went to college was immediate. Johnson notes in

“Misconceptions About the Early Land-Grant Colleges” (1981) that “Reaching out to sons, and

later daughters, of farmers and artisans…to whomever the existing system passed by was a noble

egalitarian ideal that remained just that—an ideal—for decades…” (Johnson, 1981, p. 336).

Though it took many years to grab hold, the ideal of wide swaths of the population going to
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college became more realized following the establishment of Land-Grant colleges spurred to

creation by the Morril Act of 1862. As Johnson concludes “[Land-Grant colleges] were ahead of

their times…When the ideal did blossom, it did so magnificently, and these new institutions were

often pacesetters” (Johnson, 1981, p. 338-9).

Normal Schools

Normal schools were colleges that began, primarily, as institutions set to educate students

how to become teachers. Largely established by individual states, the lasting effects of normal

schools can still be seen today, as many state colleges—non-flagship, tier 1, state institutions—

owe their current existence in normal school roots.

However, given that normal schools were not federally established, and thus less likely to

be uniformly created with specifically defined missions and structures, a normal school from one

state to the next—or even within states—would yield difference experiences. One common

theme that is widely true about normal schools and their expansion across the United States in

the mid-to-late 19th century is that they—like land-grant colleges—would serve different

students than colleges from the Colonial Era.

Thelin (2011) states that “Normal schools reflected the diversity of their constituencies.

Some were created for women. Others were coeducational. And in some of the coeducational

institutions, women became the majority” (Thelin, 2011, p. 85). This is a seismic shift in the

answer of the question “Who goes to college?”. And it did not stop there. Groups other than

white women attended normal schools, as “…state normal schools made higher education

available to a significant number of students from minority racial and ethnic groups” (Ogren,

2003, p. 643). Though many normal schools did not offer the same type of education as seen in
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Colonial Era colleges, they did offer an education that typically expanded beyond secondary

school, and thus fit within the umbrella of higher education in the United States.

The lasting effect of normal schools is rather clear today. Many of these institutions exist

today, though rarely under the same name with which they were founded. In Massachusetts, both

Salem State and Framingham State are former normal schools, and even today their curriculum

largely centers around degree programs in education. And, most importantly, the students that

normal schools served would prove to be wildly different than the students who went to college a

century or even half century prior, and this shift was largely due to the establishment of normal

schools by legislation from numerous state governments.

Conclusion

Higher education in the United States historically, including in its Colonial Era, is not

something which has attainable or accessible by the vast majority of society. Women, ethnic and

racial minoritized groups, and most white men below the top of the social order were excluded at

Colonial Era colleges like Harvard and William and Mary.

Through actions by both the federal and many state governments, greater access to

postsecondary learning became possible for a greater cross-section of people throughout the

nineteenth century. Thanks in large part to Land-Grant colleges and normal schools, a

framework was laid for future generations of people attending college who were and are different

than colonial collegegoers. “Who goes to college?” is a question that has had a changing answer

for centuries in the United States, and one which the country continues to wrestle with today.

Governmental action will continue to play a part in how this question is answered beyond today,

just as it was beyond the Colonial Era.

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References

Harvard Library. (n.d.). Harvard charter of 1650. Retrieved from

http://library.harvard.edu/university-archives/using-the-collections/online-

resources/charter-of-1650

Johnson, E. L. (1981). Misconceptions About the Early Land-Grant Colleges. The Journal of

Higher Education, 52(4), 333-351. doi:10.2307/1981282

Ogren, C. A. (2003). Rethinking the "nontraditional" student from a historical perspective: State

normal schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Journal of Higher

Education, 74(6), 640-664. doi:10.1353/jhe.2003.0046

Thelin, J. R. (2011). A history of american higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

University Press.

Wright, B. (1988). “For the children of the infidels”?: American indian education in the colonial

colleges. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 12(3), 1-14.

doi:10.17953/aicr.12.3.ht5837m3502m57w1