isadore;1854657 wrote:gosh a ruddies, you picked the 1850 with your low costs of $150 yearly tuition.
Of course I did. You brought up land grant colleges, so I went to the time prior to the Morrill Land Grant College Act. What time period would you prefer I use?
isadore;1854657 wrote:Of course average yearly income was about just over a year in country where a large portion of the population are subsistence farmers. And 15% of the people were slaves.
I have no objection to the problem raised regarding the inability of slaves to attend college. That's fair.
However, the objection you raise regarding subsistence farmers really isn't a problem, because that sort of life precluded many of the conventional life expenses that we deem necessities in our current era, namely food and shelter (as many homes were lived in through multiple generations and did not require rent or mortgage payments nearly as often as today).
Beyond that, we don't see a significant difference in the regard to yearly income comparisons to tuition. The two are inflated at about the same rate between then and now.
isadore;1854657 wrote:The preponderance of colleges were established by churches and their major function at the time was to produce ministers.
This is a false cause-effect. The fact that a college was established by churches does not necessitate that they're created for the purpose of producing ministers.
Make no mistake. At the time the colleges were founded (before the time in which we're talking here, I should add), ministers WERE expected to be well-rounded, with adequate knowledge of sciences, mathematics, and philosophy. Ministers were held to a higher standard at the time than they are today in that regard.
However, the overarching reason for both the start of colleges AND the insistence of well-rounded ministers was a high value placed on a well-rounded, well-educated populace. In essence, the churches saw a value in a well-educated population, and they insisted that the ministers in their local churches demonstrated that value. That doesn't, however, require the purpose of the college to be for the education of ministers at all. In fact, documented church history would show that assumption to be untrue.
For example, the mid-1800s were after the Second Great Awakening, which did plant the seeds for devaluing a well-rounded education (including within their own clergy), but the schools in question were started prior to that, and that shift made the church's desire for a well-educated clergy almost nonexistent in some denominations. As such, for the time frame we're talking about, colleges really weren't for the purpose of educating the clergy, because it was no longer a priority to have such an educated clergy. For reference, see documentation on the revivals of Charles Finney and the Layman's Prayer Revival, which were major movements during the Second Great Awakening.
isadore;1854667 wrote:1. The University you selected is hardly reflected of colleges at the time. It was started by Ben Franklin in the 1740s and was more reflective of his values and was non sectarian. Almost all other colleges were established to promote a particular sect and train its minister.
I don't know if you actually looked at the link, but Penn is not pulling exclusively from its own history. It's merely the university aggregating the information on the swath of colleges at the time.
isadore;1854667 wrote:2. But even at that despite your claims about a merchant class, the curriculum does little to reflect their skill set.
This is true. As I said above, colleges were not glorified trade schools. You studied under an experienced person in the field you wished to enter for that sort of training. Colleges were for the purpose of helping bring about a well-rounded, well-educated population at large. College was optional and not connected to the ability to make a living at all.
Frankly, given the level of education in many universities, I think there are elements of that model that are better than what we currently have. If students wish to attend college solely for the purpose of gaining the necessary knowledge for a career, perhaps we should instead be pursuing a wider variety of trade schools as opposed to four-year universities, where the students often do not have much interest in half the classes they take.
If our goal is to allow more people to receive the necessary education for a career, why not have two-year schools for things like accounting, business, medicine, etc? It would make achieving that much cheaper, lowering the financial bar and allowing more people to achieve that sort of education without going into obscene amounts of debt.
isadore;1854667 wrote:3. The Plantation owners are exactly the type of elitist that could afford the education, Not the slaves or the subsistence white farmers who made up over 90% of southern population at the time.
True of the slaves, and again, that was certainly a problem (though I would submit that there were other inhibitors to slaves attending college beyond the cost). However, the subsistence farmers didn't deal with the sorts of everyday expenses we deal with today, and as such, it wouldn't have been as out-of-reach to them as you're implying. It simply wasn't important, because a college education wasn't the sort of thing that lent itself to a better career.
