Colleges: An Endangered Species? describes how American higher education has changed over the years:
Until about fifty years ago, our most prestigious academic institutions were pretty much the domain of well-born prep school boys. In 1912, Owen Johnson’s enduringly popular novel (most recently reprinted in 2003) Stover at Yale gave a picture of Ivy life as a gladiatorial contest among alpha males who, by beating out their rivals for a spot on the team or in the club, learned to achieve ‘victory…on the broken hopes of a comrade,’ and went on to rule the nation. In 1920, Scott Fitzgerald (Princeton ’17) called Stover at Yale the ‘textbook’ for his generation.
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At the turn of the century, when Stover was prepping for Yale, fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or about 2 percent of the population between eighteen and twenty-four, attended college. By the end of World War II, that figure had risen to over two million. In 1975, it stood at nearly ten million, or one third of the young adult population. Today, the United States leads the world by a considerable margin in the percentage of citizens (27 percent or 79 million) who are college graduates.
Of course, the schools themselves have changed dramatically. Before the Civil War, most schools were centers of moral learning, closely tied to a particularly church. This changed with the introduction of the land-grant system:
By the mid-nineteenth century, the need for expert training in up-to-date agricultural and industrial methods was becoming an urgent matter in the expanding nation, and, with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress provided federal land grants to the loyal states (30,000 acres for each of its senators and representatives) for the purpose of establishing colleges “where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” Eventually these “land-grant” colleges evolved into the system of state universities.
Incidentally, Cornell is both a private university and a land-grant school:
In 1895, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, whose private endowment was augmented by land granted to New York State under the Morrill Act, looked back at the godly era and declared himself well rid of “a system of control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged.”