Historical Trends at American Colleges and Universities

Historical Trends at American Colleges and Universities

The colonial colleges were among the first colleges created and were established under religious auspices. It was believed that an educated ministry was needed to establish Christianity in the New World. Harvard College was established in 1636, followed by Yale, William and Mary, Princeton and King ‘s College later to be called Columbia University and there were also others. The general colonial college curriculum included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, and logic. Later philosophy, metaphysics, ethics and mathematics were added. The argument later arose that colleges for agriculture and mechanical science should be established with support from federal land grants, thus the Morill Act of 1862 was created. This act granted each state 30,000 acres of public land for each senator and representative of Congress and the income from this grant was to support state colleges for agricultural and mechanical instruction. Many leading state universities today originated as land-grant colleges.

It is noted that the largest and most popular higher education institutions is the two-year community college which originated as junior colleges in the late 19th and 20th century.
These junior colleges were reorganized into community colleges with the broader function of serving the needs of their communities’ educational needs. The greatest growth in American higher education came after World War II with the passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944. To help readjust society to peacetime and reintegrate returning service people into domestic life, this bill provided federal funds for veterans for education. Seven million, eight hundred thousand veterans took advantage of this bill’s assistance to attend technical schools, colleges and universities. This increased growth in higher education enrollments that has continued through today.

Since the 1980’s the cost of attending colleges have increased rapidly. Rising costs of for Medicare, highways and prisons have caused many states to reduce a percentage of their budget for higher education. Colleges and Universities currently face a very serious challenge:
1. The need to contain escalating costs so that higher education is affordable for most people.
2. The need to maintain high standards of instruction while educating la...

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...s assimilationists’ past.

Recent Historical Trends
Some recent historical trends just to list a few are movements toward gender equity, equal educational opportunities for students with disabilities, increased professionalism of education, and reduction of violence in schools.

Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act and the Women’s Educational Equity Act of 1974 prohibited discrimination against women in federally aided education programs. In 1975, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which improved opportunities for a group of children who had previously lacked full access to a quality education.

War on Terrorism
On September 11, 2001, foreign terrorists hijacked and deliberately crashed commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The attack and resulting loss of nearly 6000 lives have changed the way Americans view the world and life in their own country. This was mentioned to show how education is part of our ongoing culture, how schools have responded to crises in the past and how schools can promote democratic values and multicultural understanding in a time of crisis.