Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - 33

mid-century was modest, ranging from $10 at the University
of Wisconsin to $75 at Harvard; the big-ticket item was living
expenses, which were often double or even triple the tuition
charges. Nor were these fees enough to keep schools afloat.
Some cash-poor land grant universities sold parts of their
campuses or spent down their endowments; others tried to
cut costs by requiring faculty and students to maintain and
clean their buildings, while still others temporarily shut their
doors. At a time when only a tiny fraction of Americans went
to college, state lawmakers continued to regard it as something
that advantaged select individuals. So they balked at
appropriating tax dollars for the universities, which seemed
to subsidize some people at the expense of others.
Meanwhile, supporters of the Morrill Act were divided
about whether it would provide practical training for workers
and farmers-as the act proclaimed-or catapult them
into the burgeoning middle class of teachers, lawyers, and
other white-collar professionals. Although he was the son of
a blacksmith, Justin Morrill became a wealthy entrepreneur
who invested in railroads and supported tariffs on foreign
goods; his main goal was to prepare a new generation of engineers
and managers who could advance American capitalism
against its global competitors. Similarly, the head of Yale's
Sheffield Scientific School-Connecticut's first land grant institution-insisted
that it would fit graduates for industrial
and scientific leadership rather than for " labor with the hoe
or anvil. " These claims angered farming organizations like the
Grange, which feared that the land grant schools would lure
graduates away from the soil; they also complained about entrance
exams, which required Latin and other academic subjects
that rural boys rarely studied. In Connecticut, where a
Sheffield professor scoffed that " Yale College does not propose
to run a machine shop, " pressure from the Grange persuaded
legislators to move the state's land grant school from
stuffy New Haven to a new " agricultural school " in Storrs. But
the students who went there aspired to middle-class careers,
just as Morrill wished. The school soon morphed from an
open-admissions manual-training institution to a more selective
state college centered on the liberal arts. Tuition rose
in tandem with admission standards, dampening opportunities
for poor and working-class candidates.
Elsewhere, land grant universities hewed more closely
to their founding mission. At North Carolina College of Agriculture
and Mechanic Arts-which became North Carolina
State University-the state's burgeoning Populist movement
skewered the land grant school for providing " theoretical,
literary, and ultra-scientific education " instead of teaching
more " practical " arts. The university squared the difference
by mandating three hours of classroom recitation-the standard
mode of academic instruction-and three hours of manual
training; it also required all students to take agriculture,
horticulture, shop work, and mechanical drawing. Most of all,
Populists ensured that state universities remained either free
or very close to it, so that-at least in theory-anyone could
attend. " Fie upon the people's higher schools, if they are to
be but rich men's schools! " thundered the president of Kansas
State Agricultural College (later Kansas State); indeed, he
added, " democracy should tolerate no tollgates on the educational
highway. " In 1887, Arkansas barred its state university
from charging tuition to students taking vocational courses.
" The son of a rich man can go to Harvard, Yale, Columbia or
Princeton, and pay the $150 or $200 per year demanded by
these institutions for tuition, " the Nebraska Farmers' Alliance
declared in 1891, " but the boy from the poor man's home
cannot do this ... The free state university is his only hope. "
Thanks to its Populist defenders, the University of Nebraska
didn't charge tuition during these years. But fees for
room, board, and books could run as high as $175, which
placed the school beyond the means of many poor and working-class
families. And despite the proliferation of new colleges
in the 19th century, a relatively small number of Americans
patronized them. In 1880, only 26 of 811 higher education
institutions had more than 200 students. Lacking the
donors and endowments of the more established private colleges,
state universities were especially slow to get off the
ground. In the 1880s, the University of Wisconsin and Thomas
Jefferson's University of Virginia were smaller than Amherst;
Indiana University had fewer students than Williams,
and the University of Minnesota was about the same size as
Bowdoin. Students came overwhelmingly from the upper
classes or from the burgeoning new middle class of managers,
lawyers, and other professions. And insofar as poorer
students went to college, they too aimed to join the whitecollar
labor force. Despite Populist paeans to agriculture, a
Colorado educator explained, country boys came to college
to avoid a " slave life of labor " ; indeed, a Tennessee Populist
politician admitted, they were " sick and disgusted with farming. "
They sought jobs in business and the professions, even
though most of these positions did not yet require a bachelor's
degree for entry. A college credential might help pave the
way for success, but it was hardly a prerequisite for it.
A
ll of that would change over the next century, when
postsecondary education became the sine qua non of
security and sustainability. In 1900, only 2 percent of
high school graduates in the United States went to college;
in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, 66 percent did. An
institution that formerly served just a sliver of white males
now enlists a majority of Americans. And there are roughly
4,000 two- and four-year degree-granting institutions in the
United States, including public, private nonprofit, and forprofit
schools.
But even as we created an economy that required postsecondary
education to get ahead-or even to get by-our
polity made higher education a consumer good that only
some citizens could reasonably afford. That's the key theme of
a bracing new book by the historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
called, yes, Indentured Students. As Shermer acknowledges,
government assistance has helped millions of Americans attend
college. But postsecondary education remained beyond
Washington Monthly 33
Washington Monthly - September/October 2023

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