The Colonial Colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the American Colonies before the United States of America became a sovereign nation after the American Revolution. These nine have long been considered together, notably in the survey of their origins in the 1907 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Seven of the nine colonial colleges are part of the Ivy League athletic conference: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth. (The eighth member of the Ivy League, Cornell University, was founded in 1865.)
The two colonial colleges not in the Ivy League are now both public universities—The College of William & Mary and Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey. William & Mary was a private institution from 1693 until just after the American Civil War, when it received some support from the state. It became public in 1906. Rutgers became the State University of New Jersey after World War II.
Read more about Colonial Colleges: The Nine Colonial Colleges, Other Colonial-era Foundations
Famous quotes containing the words colonial and/or colleges:
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)