Marta Yacobi
Allan
Honors Advanced Exposition
30 May 2014
Not Everyone is Bill Gates
Bill Gates is one of the most successful men in the United States, he is a philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor. Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company. Truth reveals, he did not attend college. Some may say college is not necessary in a person’s life to be successful and achieve their goals and use this man as an example to support their claim, others rely on other wealthy men like Steve Jobs, who also did not go to college and was an entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor, who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. It is important that our society realizes these men are one in a million. Back in time, when resources like technology and colleges were not around, competition was not such an issue in society, today, we live in a modern world in which the majority of our society attends prestigious colleges and compete with each other for future opportunities. Outstanding brains are interviewed every day by CEOs of successful companies to be given a work position they compete for. Software/technology companies, firms, stock companies and many more are to choose between a brilliant man who attended Harvard University and another brilliant man who attended Stanford University. Competition in life, specifically in the work force has been increasing since the mid 1970s because of the improvements being made in society. In order to be successful in life in the twenty-first century it is crucial to attend college and acquire such degree.
History of Universities in America
Imperial governments usually invested little in colonial colleges. The typical mercantile approach emphasized the exportation of agricultural products and raw materials from the provinces to the homeland. While a succession of kings and queens encouraged the cultivation and exportation of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, in the British Empire, colleges also flourished as an unlikely crop in America. New England settlers included many alumni of the royally chartered British universities, Cambridge and Oxford, and therefore believed education was essential. In addition, the Puritans emphasized a learned clergy and an educated civil leadership. Their outlook generated Harvard College in 1636. Between Harvard's founding and the start of the American Revolution, the colonists chartered nine colleges and seminaries although only one in the South.
Religion provided an impetus for the creation of colonial colleges. As the First Great Awakening of the 1730s to 1770s initiated growth in a wider variety of Protestant churches, each denomination often desired its own seminary. Furthermore, each colony tended to favor a particular denomination and so the new colleges took on an importance for regional development as well. Presbyterians in New Jersey founded the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton). The College of William and Mary in Virginia maintained a strong Anglican orientation, reflecting that colony's settlement by landed gentry from England. The Baptists, who had been expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled in Rhode Island, established their own college but in an unusual move did not require religious tests for admission. Other dissenting religious groups, such as the Methodists and Quakers, became enthusiastic college builders after facing hostility in many colleges.
Small in size and limited in scope, colonial colleges rarely enrolled more than one hundred students and few completed their degrees. Yet the young men who attended these colonial colleges made historic and extraordinary contributions to both political thought and action. Also, colleges represented one of the few institutional ventures to receive royal and/or colonial government support and regulation during the eighteenth century. The college's multipurpose buildings were typically