Old-Time College

. Before the Civil War higher education in America consisted of a scattered group of small colleges in various stages of development. Harvard, founded in 1636, was America's oldest and most prestigious institution. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and other Ivy League institutions, which by 1850 had faculties ranging from fifteen to twenty-five and student bodies from three hundred to four hundred, were large by American standards. More typical were the many tiny colleges that dotted the country. These smaller and more obscure schools typically employed a staff of only six or eight instructors, with enrollments ranging between fifty to one hundred students. Only one in five colleges created before 1860 survived, and most of those that did were educationally ineffective, unable to offer variety or rigorous studies. The relatively low quality of American colleges and the restrictive nature of the curriculum prior to the 1860s...