The roots of American higher education are extraordinarily local. Unlike the European university, with its aspirations toward universality and its history of cosmopolitanism, the American college of the 19th century was a home-town entity. Most often, it was founded to advance the parochial cause of promoting a particular religious denomination rather than to promote higher learning. In a setting where no church was dominant and all had to compete for visibility, stature, and congregants, founding colleges was a valuable way to plant the flag and promote the faith. This was particularly true when the population was rapidly expanding into new territories to the west, which meant that no denomination could afford to cede the new terrain to competitors. Starting a college in Ohio was a way to ensure denominational growth, prepare clergy, and spread the word.
Alternatively, colleges were founded with an eye toward civic boosterism, intended to shore up a community’s claim to be a major cultural and commercial center rather than a sleepy farm town. With a college, a town could claim that it deserved to gain lucrative recognition as a stop on the railroad line, the site for a state prison, the county seat, or even the state capital. These consequences would elevate the value of land in the town, which would work to the benefit of major landholders. In this sense, the 19th century college, like much of American history, was in part the product of a land development scheme. In general, these two motives combined, as colleges emerged as a way to advance both the interests of particular sects and also the interests of the towns where they were lodged. Better to have multiple rationales and sources of support than just one (Brown, 1995).
As a result, church officials and civic leaders around the country scrambled to get a state charter for a college (but with little or no state financial support), establish a board of trustees made up of local notables, and install a president. The latter would rent a local building, hire a small and modestly accomplished faculty, and serve as the CEO of a marginal educational enterprise, which sought to draw tuition-paying students from the area in order to make the college a going concern. With colleges arising to meet local and sectarian needs, the result was the birth of a large number of small, parochial, and weakly funded institutions in a very short period of time in the 19th century, which meant that most of these colleges faced a difficult struggle to survive in the competition with peer institutions. Having to operate in a time and place when the market was strong, the state weak, and the church divided, these colleges had to find a way to get by without the kind of robust support from a national government and a national church that universities in most European countries enjoyed at the time.
In this paper I examine some of the consequences of the peculiarly dispersed circumstances in which American colleges had their origins. These colleges proliferated to such an extent that by the mid-19th century the U.S. had the largest number of institutions of higher education in the world. They were not only geographically localized but also quite parochial in intellectual and academic stature. Quantity not quality was the driving force, and supply vastly exceeded demand. As a result, enrollments at individual institutions were small, and colleges had to drum up business every way they could. When a broader societal rationale for pursuing higher education began to emerge late in the 19th century – arising from the German model of the research university and middle class demand for socialization and credentialing that would give students advantageous access to the emerging white collar occupations – the large number of existing colleges provided a widely distributed and fully operational infrastructure to make a huge expansion in student enrollments easy to accomplish. Only at this point did research begin to emerge as a central part of American colleges and universities.
This historical background helps explain how American higher education in the 20th century rose from being an intellectual backwater to a world leader. These institutions enjoyed a broad base of political and financial support that was at the same time populist (educating large numbers of local students at the undergraduate level), elite (educating a small number of graduate students and producing high level academic research), and practical (providing professional training and useful inventions to serve the needs of the community).
For educational research on higher education, this structure has posed distinctive limitations. Researchers are concentrated in institutions at the top of the structure, and as a result research on higher education has tended to focus on places like Harvard and Yale rather than the community colleges and regional state universities that employ the large majority of faculty and enroll the large majority of students. In addition, the extreme geographical dispersion and decentralized governance of the system has led researchers – especially in the history of education – to focus on the distinctive characteristics of individual colleges rather than on the characteristics of the overall system.