<p>The publication of the 2009 USNWR College Rankings provides an opportunity to compare schools based on a wide variety of data points. In this and in other threads, I urge the reader to think less about the absolute rankings and more about the nature and value-added of the data point being discussed. </p>
<p>Year Founded, National University</p>
<p>1636 Harvard
1701 Yale
1740 U Penn
1746 Princeton
1754 Columbia
1764 Brown
1769 Dartmouth
1789 Georgetown
1819 U Virginia
1836 Emory
1838 Duke
1842 Notre Dame
1851 Northwestern
1853 Wash U
1861 MIT
1865 Cornell
1868 UC Berkeley
1873 Vanderbilt
1876 Johns Hopkins
1885 Stanford
1891 Caltech
1892 U Chicago
1900 Carnegie Mellon
1912 Rice
1919 UCLA</p>
<p>Year Founded, LAC</p>
<p>1749 W&L
1793 Williams
1794 Bowdoin
1800 Middlebury
1802 US Military Acad
1812 Hamilton
1813 Colby
1819 Colgate
1821 Amherst
1831 Wesleyan
1833 Haverford
1833 Oberlin
1837 Davidson
1845 US Naval Acad
1846 Grinnell
1855 Bates
1861 Vassar
1864 Swarthmore
1866 Carleton
1870 Wellesley
1871 Smith
1874 Macalester
1885 Bryn Mawr
1887 Pomona
1946 Claremont McK
1955 Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>Hawkette, I think it would be more interesting if the list were in terms of the USNWR rankings? Otherwise, I'm not sure what to take away from it -- other than old, prestigious colleges are, well, old!</p>
<p>pizza and DB,
Gathering this info from the new USNWR online rankings info is very cumbersome and time-consuming. As a result, I have limited all of these threads to the top strata, ie, those colleges that fall on the first page of the USWNR online presention (the first 25 National Universities and the first 25 LACs). Thus, this is not a listing of the oldest in the USA, but only a listing of how schools in the USNWR Top 25 compare to one another.</p>
<p>As far as the value of the datapoint, I agree that this is not particularly valuable, but more for knowledge purposes as people sometimes like this type of information. My personal view is that the datapoint might explain some of the historical advantage/prestige accorded to some colleges, but I also think it should have close to zero value in choosing a college.</p>
<p>hawkette, thanks for your work on this. I didn't realize W&M was outside the top 25. </p>
<p>Can I give W&M my write-in vote for "honorary member of the oldies but goodies" list? Coming in at #32, it's no mediocre school. And 1693 oughta count for something. ;)</p>
<p>I don't think we can make anything meaningful of this. Rutgers, founded in 1766, is the eighth-oldest college in the U.S.but it currently ranks #64 in US News. Michigan (1817) is older than 17 of the US News top 25, but it recently slipped to #26 in US News, first time ever it's been out of the top 25. The University of Georgia (chartered 1785 but no students until 1801), UNC Chapel Hill (chartered 1789, opened 1795), and the University of Delaware (1743) are also very old but not in the US News top 25.</p>
<p>Among LACs, St. John's of Annapolis (1696) is the third-oldest college in the country, but nowhere near the US News top 25. Moravian (1752), Salem (1772), Dickinson (1783), Stephens (1833), Mount Holyoke (1837), Wesleyan of Georgia (1839), and Marietta in Ohio (1842) are also older than most of the US News top 25 LACs.</p>
<p>So I guess the lesson is, if you look only at the most prestigious colleges and universities, age seems to matter. But if you look more broadly, it doesn't.</p>
<p>It would be very interesting to see a separate list of oldest universities... which really old unis failed to either gain or hold prestige, and why? Does old always correlate to prestige?</p>
<p>Curiosity got the better of me, so I googled, and found this:</p>
<p>The oldest universities, by foundation date, in the world
Year / School Name / Country
0 Universit</p>
<p>Curious -- I can see how the first seven form an Ivy Athletic Conference... they seem to have been around together for a very long time. </p>
<p>How did Cornell gain inclusion into the Ivy Athletic Conference so many years after all the others? It's not exactly geographically close to the others.</p>
<p>I have yet to meet a student who considered a school's founding date as a factor.
Living in Silicon Valley, where the most exciting companies were founded in the past 12 years (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) I consider an ancient founding date useless information.</p>
<p>Wow looks like the Europeans sure did blow their lead on that one. Yay government-controlled education systems!</p>
<p>
[quote]
How did Cornell gain inclusion into the Ivy Athletic Conference so many years after all the others? It's not exactly geographically close to the others.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>An excellent and mysterious question. It's certainly not as old, and it's not like it's remotely convenient for the other Ivies to travel there.</p>
<p>Another issue here is that there is no standard definition of what constitutes a school's "founding date". There are a couple of complicating factors.</p>
<p>First, many of the older colleges in the US were originally established as secondary schools, and only later -- often many decades later -- were "upgraded" to college status. So St. John's College, for example, can claim to be the third-oldest college in the US ("founded 1696"), but it did not actually issue any college degrees until the 1780s.</p>
<p>Second, the "founding date" for many colleges represents the date that they were officially chartered by an act of the State Legislature. But in many cases, the schools only existed on paper for many years after that date, while funds were raised, buildings constructed, etc. Again, the schools may not have actually operated as colleges until many years after their "founding dates".</p>
<p>In New England, for example, I believe that the only colleges that you could actually attend during the 1700s were the four New England Ivies, plus Williams. But other local schools, like UVM, Castleton State, and Bowdoin, can all claim founding dates in the 1700s, even though they never actually operated as colleges during that time.</p>
<p>
[quote]
How did Cornell gain inclusion into the Ivy Athletic Conference so many years after all the others?
[/quote]
The individual Ivy League schools (other than Cornell) were established in Colonial times, but the "Ivy League" itself is a relatively modern creation. The eight schools signed a formal "Ivy Group Agreement" for football in 1945, then agreed to create an "Ivy League" for all sports in 1954.</p>
<p>If you could talk to college sports fans from the early 20th Century, and mentioned the "Ivy League", they would have no idea what you were talking about. In fact, they wouldn't recognize any of the NCAA leagues that dominate college sports today. They might recognize the terms "Big Three" (for Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and "Little Three" (for Williams, Amherst, Wesleyan), but not much else.</p>
<p>^ Correction: the Big Ten has been known popularly as the Big Ten since 1917, when Michigan rejoined what had been the Big Nine (1899-1917). It went back to the Big Nine when the University of Chicago dropped out after World War II, but became the Big Ten again when Michigan State joined in 1950. But the conference didn't formally change its name to "Big Ten" until 1987. And since that's now officially its name, that's how it's stayed, even though Penn State joined in 1990 to make eleven teams. </p>
<p>So I don't think those early 20th Century sports fans would have too much difficulty recognizing that league. Though they might be surprised to learn that the University of Chicago Maroons, the original "Monsters of the Midway," are no longer a national football power and no longer a Big Ten member.</p>
<p>If you look at the Big 10 logo, there's actually an "Eleven" in it to reflect Penn State. (Why did Penn State join, btw? Says she from the school that sticks out like a sore thumb in the Big 10 ...)</p>
<p>I think what's interesting is how few "new" schools there are in those lists. Of the 50 schools listed there, only 4 were founded in the past 100 years. It's not so much why didn't some of the older schools catch on, but why some of these newer schools became so influential so quickly relative to the rest of the pack.</p>