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Категория: Английский язык
As for colleges, in the colonial period they followed the British pattern of Oxford and Cambridge. The early colonial colleges were established under religious auspices. Believing that an educated ministry was needed to establish Christianity in the New World, the
Massachusetts General Court created Harvard College in 1636. Yale was founded in 1701 an alternative to Harvard. In 1693, Virginia's College of William and Marry, a Church of England institution, was granted a royal charter. Princeton, in New Jersey, was chartered in 1746 as a Presbyterian college, and King's college (later Columbia University) was chartered in 1754 to serve New York's Anglicans. Other colonial colleges were the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth in New Hampshire. General colonial college curriculum included: Latin, Greek, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, ethics, mathematics and metaphysics.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, a liberal federal land-grant policy encouraged the establishment of many state colleges and universities, these colleges offered liberal arts and included seminaries for the training of ministers.
The Morrill Act of 1862 granted each state 30,000 acres of public land for each senator and representative in Congress. The income from this grant was to be used to support at least one state collage for agriculture and mechanical instruction. Many of today's leading state universities originated as land-grant colleges. Among these are the University of Illinois, Iowa State University, Michigan, Pennsylvania State Universities, and the University of Wisconsin. The rise of state colleges and universities and the enactment of the Morrill Act created the final step of an educational ladder that replaced the vestiges of the exclusive European dual-track system.
After World War II, American higher education experienced its greatest growth. In 1950—1956 college enrollments doubled from 2,4 million to 4,9 million students. By 1975, the number had almost doubled again to 9 million. By 1980, 12 million students were enrolled.
