Curated playlist
Need-blind educational institutions
- Yale UniversityYale University was founded in 1701, making it the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. It began not as a grand campus but as a single act of colonial law: "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School",…
- Cornell UniversityCornell University opened its doors on the 7th of October, 1868, with 412 male students walking onto a hillside farm in Ithaca, New York. The land had been donated by the man whose name the institution bore: Ezra Cornell, a self-made…
- Harvard UniversityHarvard University began in 1636 with a vote, cast not by scholars but by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There was no famous founder in the room. The name came later, in 1639, from a dying man. John Harvard, a…
- Columbia UniversityColumbia University received its first royal charter on the 31st of October 1754, when George II of Great Britain signed King's College into existence on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan. That founding made it the fifth-oldest…
- Princeton UniversityPrinceton University sits on 600 acres in New Jersey, and it holds something no other university in the United States can claim: the largest endowment per student in the country, at over $4.4 million per student. But the institution that…
- University of Notre DameThe University of Notre Dame began on the 26th of November 1842, when a priest named Edward Sorin arrived at a patch of northern Indiana land with eight brothers from France and Ireland and started a school inside an old log chapel. Sorin…
- University of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California opened its doors in 1880 with 53 students, 10 faculty members, and a graduating class four years later of exactly three people. One of those three was valedictorian. She was the only woman in the…
- Stanford UniversityStanford University sits on 8,180 acres of the San Francisco Peninsula, and it was born from grief. Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate who served as California's eighth governor and then as a United States senator, lost his only child,…
- Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth College sits on a terrace above the Connecticut River in Hanover, New Hampshire, surrounded by some 200 American elms that survived the Dutch elm disease that felled trees across the continent. It is the smallest university in…
- University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago was born twice. The first institution, chartered in 1857 with land from Senator Stephen A. Douglas, collapsed under the weight of debt, a great fire, and a financial panic, and closed in 1886. Four years later, a…
- Brown UniversityBrown University sits on a hill above Providence, Rhode Island, behind a set of wrought-iron gates built in 1901 that carry a peculiar superstition: walk through the central gate a second time before graduation, and you will never graduate…
- Johns Hopkins UniversityJohns Hopkins University opened its doors in Baltimore in 1876 with a radical proposition: that research and teaching were not opposites but a single, inseparable act. That idea, imported from Germany and shaped by a Quaker merchant's…
- Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered on the 10th of April 1861, and two days later the first battle of the Civil War broke out. The new school had no campus yet, only a charter signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor…
- Vassar CollegeVassar College sits on more than 1,000 acres in the Hudson Valley, about 70 miles north of New York City, and when its first building opened in 1865, it was the largest building in the United States by floor space. A single structure…
- Rice UniversityRice University began with a murder. On the morning of the 23rd of September 1900, an 84-year-old Massachusetts businessman named William Marsh Rice was found dead in his New York apartment, apparently in his sleep. Within days, a…
- California Institute of TechnologyThe California Institute of Technology, known as Caltech, sits on 124 acres in Pasadena, California, about 11 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is a place where the density of genius per square foot is almost impossible to grasp.…
- Babson CollegeBabson College began on the 3rd of September 1919, when twenty-seven students filed into a former family home on Abbott Road in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. No lecture halls, no grand quadrangle. Just a house, an idea about business…