Public vs private

tk21769
Wed, 11 Mar 2015 15:43:40 +0000

Or is it based on who was there first (ivies were founded before publics in the east)

To the extent your premise is true, yes, these are basically differences of history and geography.

All the “Colonial Colleges” (including the 8 Ivies minus Cornell) were founded about 100 years or more before the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, which created agricultural colleges throughout the USA. Many land-grant ag schools evolved into today’s state universities (although some of these, too, were founded prior to the Civil War.)

America’s first colleges (including the surviving Colonial Colleges) were founded largely to educate young men for the law or the ministry. They (and the women’s colleges that came later) also amounted to “finishing schools” to prepare affluent students for disciplined, socially acceptable uses of leisure time. The land grant colleges were founded during and after the Civil War, at the height of America’s second indutrial revolution. Their mission focus was more on the training of managers and technicians to run and improve factories, farms, and civil engineering projects.