Colonial Colleges

The colonial colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the American Colonies before the United States of America became a sovereign nation after the American Revolution. These nine have long been considered together, notably in the survey of their origins in the 1907 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Seven of the nine colonial colleges are part of the Ivy League athletic conference: Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth. (The eighth member of the Ivy League, Cornell University, was founded in 1865.)

The two colonial colleges not in the Ivy League are now both public universities—the College of William & Mary in Virginia and Rutgers University in New Jersey. William & Mary was a royal (state) institution from 1693 until the American Revolution. Between the Revolution and the American Civil War, William & Mary was a private institution. It suffered significant damage during the Civil War and began to receive public support in the 1880s. William & Mary officially became a public college in 1906, and Rutgers became "The State University of New Jersey" after World War II.

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