Who established our institutions of higher learning and why

Interesting introduction in the book by James Anderson Hawes, Twenty Years Among The Twenty Year Olds A Story Of Our Colleges Of Today, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929) which attempted to explain to students of 80 years ago how much better off they were than those who had come before them. He probably wrote it before October (stock market crash).

"Harvard was the first college or school in America and was founded in 1636 by a vote of the "General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay," which agreed "to give four hundred pounds toward a School or College," for the purpose of educating a selected few for the Church from their earliest days, "dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in dust."

The next educational institution founded was the Collegiate School of the Dutch Church in New York, . . . The third institution William and Mary was not chartered until 1693, when it was organized by the Church . . . with a similar object, "that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of Ministers of the Gospel, and that the youth may be properly educated in good manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated among the western Indians to the glory of Almighty God."

In 1695 St. John's College at Annapolis, Maryland, was founded. . . Sixty-five years after Harvard, Yale was founded largely to supply a local demand for the early training of ministers and because Harvard even then began to be looked on as rather too liberal in theology for the good old Puritan Fathers.

Therefore the first five institutions of learning on this Continent were founded as schools to train young boys of a select class, as leaders in Church and State. Please note that the founding of all our early colleges was to provide the advantage of training selected leaders, and never apparently for the purpose of offering free higher education to any and all who might wish to learn something of almost anything. They certainly had no purpose of helping all-comers to get jobs or secure wealth for themselves. The principal object of the founding of these early colleges was frankly theological and for many years a majority, or at least a very large proportion, of those who graduated entered the ministry.

. . . the fact must be remembered that our entire educational system from top to bottom was instituted and for many years carried on directly by the Church in every one of our colonies. Not only was this the case in New England, but Princeton, founded next, was a product of the interests of the Presbyterian Church. The next founded was Pennsylvania, in 1750, when Benjamin Franklin interested the cultured Quakers in a center of learning for their city and section. . . the first with any definite idea of charity in helping the poorer classes.

The next in order was King's College in New York, changed at the time of the Revolution to Columbia. This institution was founded largely by the Episcopal Church and supported by Trinity, perhaps the richest private church corporation in the world. It was essentially aristocratic in its organization and a school for the better class of New Yorkers, especially of the Episcopal Church, as the charter reads,
“The chief Thing that is aimed at in this College is, to teach and engage the Children to know God in Jesus Christ, and to live and serve Him in all Sobriety, Goodliness and Righteousness of life, with a perfect heart and a willing Mind.”

Rutgers followed on a foundation by the Dutch Church . . ."