Colonial colleges

The colonial colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the Thirteen Colonies before the founding of the United States. The nine colonial colleges were documented in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, which provided an assessment of their origins and was published in 1907.

Seven of the nine colonial colleges are among the nation's eight Ivy League universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Brown, and Dartmouth. The remaining Ivy League institution, Cornell University, was founded in 1865. Six of these seven are fully private universities. Cornell University, which was founded as a land-grant research university of New York state, includes both private and public colleges. Cornell's College of Engineering and its College of Arts and Sciences, for instance, are private. Its College of Veterinary Medicine, on the other hand, is public.

The two colonial colleges not in the Ivy League, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, are both public universities. William & Mary was a royal institution from its 1693 founding until the American Revolution. Between the Revolution and the American Civil War, it was a private institution, but 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.

Rutgers University, founded in 1766 as Queen's College, was named for Queen Charlotte. For much of its history, it was privately affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. It changed its name to Rutgers College in 1825, and was designated as the State University of New Jersey after the end of World War II.

Nine colonial colleges

Seven of the nine colonial colleges began their histories as institutions of higher learning. The other two developed out of existing preparatory schools. The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, began operating in 1751 as the Academy of Philadelphia, a secondary school founded by Benjamin Franklin, and later added an institution of higher education in 1755 following the granting of a charter to the College of Philadelphia. Dartmouth College, an Ivy League college in Hanover, New Hampshire, began operating in 1768 as the collegiate department of Moor's Charity School, a secondary school founded in 1754 by Eleazar Wheelock, the college's founder. Dartmouth considers its founding date to be 1769, when it was granted a collegiate charter.

Other colonial-era colleges and universities

Several other colleges and universities trace their founding to colonial-era academies or schools, but are not considered colonial colleges because they were not formally chartered as colleges with degree-granting powers until after the nation's founding in 1776. These include: