Upper-division college

An upper division college is a type of educational institution that traces its roots to educational ideas put forward in the late 19th and early 20th century. They were developed primarily in the United States during the 1960s in response to the growing number of community college students seeking to continue their education. They differ from a regular college or university in that they do not provide the first two years of undergraduate instruction and require applicants to already have completed two years of study at another institution.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, educational leaders such as William R. Harper and David Starr Jordan sought to separate the preparatory portion of college studies from "real" university work undertaken in the third and fourth years of study. Jordan, then president of Stanford University, proposed splitting the institution into two parts in 1907 to reach this goal, however changes the California secondary school system halted this proposal.

Upper division colleges were first established as mainstream institutions in the 1950s in the United States as a means to respond to the need for educated professionals to assist in the space race. While earlier efforts had been undertaken at the University of Georgia in 1858, they failed due to the onset of the Civil War.

The first upper division college was the College of the Pacific in , California, which operated as an upper-division college between 1935 and 1951, before becoming the University of the Pacific in 1961. This was done as part of a plan to reduce costs and increase enrollment by subletting college facilities to a high school which assumed public junior college status and funding. However, disagreements between the College of the Pacific and the affiliated junior college, as well as accreditation issues resulting from the arrangement, led to the abandonment of the experiment in 1951.

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