FIRST COLLEGE IN USA FOUNDED IN MASSACHUSETTS ON 1636 OCTOBER 28 ( HARVARD UNIVERSITY )

FIRST COLLEGE IN USA  FOUNDED

 IN MASSACHUSETTS ON 1636 OCTOBER 28

( HARVARD UNIVERSITY )

Engraving of Harvard College by Paul Revere, 1767

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.[1] 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.[2] Seven of the nine colonial colleges are part of the Ivy League athletic conference: Harvard, Penn, Yale, Princeton, 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 in Virginia and Rutgers University in New Jersey. William & Mary was a royal (state) institution from 1693 until the American Revolution. Between the Revolution and the American Civil War, it was a private institution. The college suffered significant damage during the Civil War and began to receive public support in the 1880s. William & Mary officially became a public college in 1906, and Rutgers became the state university of New Jersey after World War II.

The nine colonial colleges[edit]

Seven of the nine colonial colleges began their histories as institutions of higher learning de novo (i.e., with no predecessor parent organization). Dartmouth College began operating in 1768 as the collegiate department of Moor's Charity School, a secondary school started in 1754 by Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock. Dartmouth considers its founding date to be 1769, when it was granted a collegiate charter. The University of Pennsylvania began operating in 1751 as a secondary school, the Academy of Philadelphia, and added an institution of higher education in 1755 with the granting of a charter to the College of Philadelphia.

Institution (present name, if different)	Colony	Founded	Chartered	First instruction (degrees)	Primary religious influence	Ivy League
College of Rhode Island[24] (Brown University)	Colony of Rhode Island	1764	1764[25]	1765[26]	Baptist (no religious requirement for admissions)[nb 6]	Yes
College of William & Mary	Colony of Virginia	1693[nb 2]	1693[6]	1694[7]	Church of England[nb 3]	No
Collegiate School (Yale University)	Connecticut Colony	1701	1701[8]	1702 (1702 honorary MA) (1703 BA)[9]	Puritan (Congregational)	Yes
New College[nb 1] (Harvard University)	Massachusetts Bay Colony	1636	1650[3]	1642 (1642)	Puritan (Congregational)	Yes
Dartmouth College	Province of New Hampshire	1769	1769[29]	1768 (1771)[nb 7]	Puritan (Congregational)	Yes
College of New Jersey (Princeton University)	Province of New Jersey	1746	1746[10]	1747 (1748)	Presbyterian but officially nonsectarian	Yes
Queen's College (Rutgers University)	Province of New Jersey	1766	1766[28]	1771 (1774)	Dutch Reformed	No
King's College (Columbia University)	Province of New York	1754	1754[11]	1754 (1758) [12]	Church of England with a commitment to "religious liberty."[13]	Yes
College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania)	Province of Pennsylvania	1755 (college)[nb 4]	1755[18]	1755 (1757)	Church of England but officially nonsectarian[19][nb 5]	Yes