USA

Harvard was established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony to train clergy and grew into the most recognized university on earth. It ...

Chartered in the Connecticut colony, Yale moved to New Haven in 1716 and built the collegiate gothic campus that defines its image...

Princeton began as the College of New Jersey and moved to the small town that later took its name. It emphasizes undergraduates un...

Founded as King's College by royal charter, Columbia adopted its current name after independence. Its core curriculum, teaching pr...

Penn grew from a charity school Benjamin Franklin championed into a practical-minded Ivy. Its medical school, opened 1765, was the...

Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded a university where any person could find instruction in any study, combining Ivy tra...

Founded with John D. Rockefeller's money and William Rainey Harper's ambition, Chicago rebuilt American higher education around re...

Named for its benefactor, a Baltimore merchant, Johns Hopkins adopted the Humboldtian ideal of teaching through research. Its hosp...

Leland and Jane Stanford founded the university in memory of their son, willing it an 8,000 acre farm that became the valley's anc...

Berkeley opened as California's first land-grant university and grew into the strongest public research campus in the world by com...

Founded in Detroit two decades before Michigan statehood, the university moved to Ann Arbor in 1837 and set the model for the grea...

Jefferson designed UVA around a lawn and rotunda rather than a church, making it the first US secular university and an architectu...

Beginning as a rural Methodist school, Duke was rebuilt in Durham with Washington Duke's tobacco fortune and named for his son Jam...

Chartered in 1789 and open to students by 1795, UNC claims the title of oldest public university in America by first class. Its ol...

William Marsh Rice's murder-for-fortune story nearly derailed the institute bearing his name, but it opened in 1912 anyway, tuitio...

Albert Gallatin and town fathers founded NYU to serve the merchant class excluded from Columbia. Its Washington Square campus abso...

MIT opened after the Civil War began, built on William Barton Rogers' plan for polytechnic education by doing. Its radar lab at th...

Caltech began as Throop University and was rebuilt by George Ellery Hale into a science powerhouse deliberately kept small. With r...

Andrew Carnegie founded technical schools for Pittsburgh workers; the merger with Mellon Institute in 1967 created today's univers...

Founded to rebuild the postbellum South's industrial base, Georgia Tech opened with 84 students and now enrolls about 45,000 acros...

Indiana's land-grant university chose Lafayette after a Tippecanoe County bid, opening with six teachers and 39 students. Its scho...

Stephen Van Rensselaer endowed a school for the application of science to common life in 1824, creating the oldest technological u...

Chartered with a bequest from Colonel Ephraim Williams, the college opened in the Berkshires and now typically tops US liberal art...

Founded by Congregationalists to educate indigent young men of piety, Amherst became a national leader in access and curriculum re...

Founded by Quakers on Hicksite principles and unusual for offering engineering within a liberal arts college, Swarthmore pairs ABE...

Founded by Congregationalists on a desert-railroad town's empty mesa, Pomona became the anchor of the Claremont Colleges consortiu...

Founded by Henry Fowle Durant to prepare women for great conflicts as he put it, Wellesley enrolls about 2,400 students on a lakes...

Chartered in the year 1800 in a town of scattered farms, Middlebury grew into the liberal arts college most identified with langua...

The Mayo brothers formalized their father's Minnesota practice into the world's first integrated, salaried group practice, then cr...

Roger Babson, a business statistician who predicted the 1929 crash's arrival, founded the college to teach entrepreneurial operati...

Frank Damrosch founded the Institute of Musical Art in 1905 to keep American musicians from crossing the Atlantic for training. Th...

RISD was founded in 1877 after Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf led the Rhode Island Women's Centennial Commission to invest its exhibiti...

Lawrence Berk founded Schillinger House in 1945 to teach modern arranging his own way; it became Berklee and grew into the largest...

Chartered in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, it took the Brown name in 1804 ...

Eleazar Wheelock obtained a royal charter in 1769 to found the college in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a stated mission to educate...

Founded in 1851 by Methodist leaders including John Evans, Northwestern was named for the old Northwest Territory and sits on the ...

UCLA began in 1919 as the Southern Branch of the University of California and moved to its Westwood campus in 1929, where Royce Ha...

The University of Texas opened in 1883 on forty acres near the state capitol, and its 307-foot Main Building tower still dominates...

Chartered in 1794 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, when Maine was still part of it, Bowdoin sits in Brunswick near the coast....

Industrialist Joseph Wharton endowed the school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881, creating the first collegiate business ...

Founded in 1848, the year Wisconsin became a state, the university spreads along the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison. The Wiscons...