S. in Seattle wants to know: “Why/how did going to college become so popular?”
In 1935, a mediocre student with a 1.3 GPA named John applied to Harvard University. This was his 5-sentence application essay:
"The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a 'Harvard man' is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain."
Certainly this wouldn't cut the mustard with the admissions department nowadays, but back then it didn't matter: young John F. Kennedy was accepted, along with 85% of his fellow applicants that year. In those days Harvard was a finishing school for the sons of the Boston elite, and if your family could pay the tuition bill you were welcome to attend (as long as you were a white male and your name wasn't Cohen or Rosenberg). So how did we go from a society where only a single-digit percentage of people had college degrees and Harvard was less selective than a ride at Disneyworld, to a point where it is expected that everyone in America should attend college?
Some people say the US is an anti-intellectual society, but in reality, America has always been keen on higher education, and much keener than most other countries. There were already 9 colleges in America at the time of independence, when there were only two universities in England, a number that had been unchanged since 1209 when Cambridge was founded. This is partly due to America's history of religious freedom: in the 18th and even part-way through the 19th century, religious instruction was a major function of universities, whereas today theology students are an endangered species on non-religious campuses. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Rutgers, Princeton, and other early American universities were set up by various Christian denominations to train their ministers. The anarchic aspect of American Protestantism meant that if you didn't like what was being preached from the pulpit, you could just leave and make your own new religious sect. Get enough followers, and you'd need a college to train disciples. Whereas back in the old country, the Established Church had a headlock on higher education (in England, anyway, there were more universities in Scotland at the time). You had to belong to the official church to attend Oxford or Cambridge: non-Anglicans in England could not receive university degrees until 1854, and the church used its influence to prevent the government from granting royal charters (with degree-granting authority) to any other group that wanted to open a university. The distances involved in America also provided an impetus to set up new universities as the population spread west: if you were living on a farm in Ohio in 1810 it would be rather difficult to get up to Boston, so why not attend the brand-new University of Ohio? Most people didn't have much use for a college education, anyway: only doctors, lawyers, and ministers really needed a degree. Of course, for the most part these institutions were open to white men only. The first college for women (Mount Holyoke) opened in 1837, and the first college for Black students (Cheyney University of Pennsylvania) opened the same year, but among 19th century women and Black people, college graduates were vanishingly rare.
By 1900 there were about 1,000 colleges and universities in America (which was quite a lot: in England there were only 7, and in education-crazed Imperial Germany there were 35), granting about 27,000 bachelors degrees per year, at a rate of 35 degrees per 100,000 population. Nowadays we hand out bachelors degrees at a rate of 603 per 100,000, so about 17x as many people are graduating from college in America now vs. 1900. As we’ll see in a minute, it was 1940s-1950s when college went from a niche pursuit to the default path.
In the early 20th century there was a push to enroll more kids in high school: prior to this it was not the default that you would stay in school through your teenage years. As society industrialized, workers needed a basic education to be able to hold skilled factory jobs, and there was a fear that immigrants wouldn't assimilate properly unless they learned English and civics at school. Compulsory education laws and publicly-funded schools became more common, so that by 1940 most 18-year-olds were high school graduates, up from <10% at the turn of the century. The push to enroll more kids in school required more teachers, and teachers needed credentials, so a greater demand was created for college education. Teacher's colleges became more common, these were usually called "normal schools", but most of them changed their names to “such-and-such State University” later on: dozens of modern colleges started out this way. The growth of teaching colleges also greatly expanded the ranks of Black graduates: most of the people attending Black colleges at this time were aiming to become teachers. So in the graph below, you’ll see a slow but steady rise in the number of graduates up until the WWII years:
But still, by 1940 only a single-digit percentage of Americans had university degrees. During WWII, enrollment dipped as a huge number of college-aged men and women went into the armed forces, and the government passed the famous "G.I. Bill", which paid for college tuition for military veterans. This led to an increased enrollment at colleges in the late 40s, along with an increase of federal and state funding that led to a major expansion of what has now become the standard residential campus model. At the same time, there was an increased focus on scientific research as the Cold War began. University research had made considerable contributions to the Manhattan Project, and this federal-funding model became institutionalized in the 1950s: federal agencies started pouring billions of dollars into research, which required more labs, more researchers, and of course, more students.
Subsequently, once the WWII generation started having children (and they had quite a lot of them), there was now a greater cultural expectation that students would go to college after high school. The premise of the American Dream is that parents can give their children a better life than they experienced themselves, so it would have been moving down the ladder instead of up if fewer baby-boomers went to college than their GI-generation parents. State and federal funding kept pouring in to expand university facilities and programs, and in the postwar era there was a political consensus that more and more funds for universities was always a good thing. In 1960, the idea that state funding for higher education should be cut in order to lower taxes would have been considered alien, and possibly treasonous in the context of the Soviet Union outpacing the US in certain fields like space exploration. So the number of college students exploded: going from about 1.5M nationwide in 1940 to 8M by 1970.
In the mid-20th century colleges opened their doors to women and racial minorities, sending more and more students to campus. Give it a few years, and that results in more and more college-educated parents who would then expect their children to follow the same path. Formerly college was an elite pursuit, but it was rapidly becoming a social norm as an unprecedented number of people went to university. Attending college was cheap back then, too. Tuition at the University of Pennsylvania cost $500 a year in 1950 ($7,700 in modern money), compared to $55k today. Public in-state tuition was even cheaper than that, so those memes about boomers paying for college with a handful of acorns and a half-off pizza coupon aren’t wrong. College proved to be a good investment: graduates earned on average 40% more than non-graduates by the 1970s, and that number rose steadily over time, reaching a premium of around 80% by the 2000s. Increasingly, more jobs required technical knowledge that was hard to obtain outside of a university: there weren't any software engineers or artificial heart valve designers in 1900, but by the mid/late Cold War era more and more of the best-paying jobs involved work in high-tech fields.
Consider as well the changes to the job market that an increased number of graduates created. Objectively, many jobs don't really require a college degree: most of us spend our days sending emails and updating powerpoints rather than splitting atoms or creating new AI models. If you were trying to fill a regular entry-level office job in 1900, you might maybe have 1 or 2 applicants out of a 100 with a college degree. A few other job-seekers, maybe 5-10, might have taken shorter non-degree programs in bookkeeping or some other relevant skill. All the others would be high school graduates at best. So you couldn't afford to be picky and wait for a Harvard graduate. Besides, that guy would be back in Boston anyway, ready to start a cush job at his father’s law firm, he wouldn’t be sniffing around Central Ohio Amalgamated Rubber & Gasket, Inc. looking for an entry-level sales job. But nowadays with so many people going to college, the bar has been raised: applicants need college at a minimum to even be considered. Just as the rise of dating apps has changed the standard to "finance. trust fund. 6'5". blue eyes", the bar has been raised across the board for all jobs.
Still, that doesn’t explain how Harvard went from admitting a dingus like JFK to becoming so hyper-competitive. Most of the expansion of enrollment in the post-WWII years happened at public universities, with entire multi-campus systems springing out of thin air and going from zero to tens of thousands enrolled in a few short years. Most of the state and federal funding, along with the Cold War research dollars, went to public universities: the private colleges didn’t see such an influx of government money. So, they didn’t experience such explosive student growth: Harvard had about 3,700 undergraduates in the 1930s, by the 60s at the peak of the baby-boom years that number had only grown to about 4,700. Nowadays it’s 7,240. Compare this to the University of Texas at Austin: 6,600 undergrads in the 30s, booming to 30,000 by the 60s, with more than 40,000 enrolled now. The old private colleges in the Northeast had always been associated with the rich WASP elite, and to them there was something unseemly about millions of the unwashed (newly-washed?) masses suddenly wanting to be included among the ranks of college students. Tuition was always higher at the privates since they didn’t receive money from the state legislatures, and in the 1980s people noticed an odd trend: as private colleges raised their tuition costs, the number of applicants increased, and the academic standards of those applicants went up as well. Private college education had become a Veblen Good: something that is in more demand the more it costs. The perceived exclusivity of private colleges, and the idea that by going to one of the Ivies you would gain access to the elite alumni network led to more and more people applying to private colleges. Since those schools couldn’t grow as fast as public universities (and they had no incentive to, not being subject to growth targets from the state government), the class sizes held steady, so the standards had to go up (unless your papa went there, of course) and the acceptance rates had to go down, until we get to where we are today.
That’s all for today, boys and girls. Let me know what other topics are keeping you up at night, and I’ll write ‘em up.
If you have a question or topic you want me to write about next, email distilledhistory@substack.com
