Land-grant colleges are state schools founded to teach “agricultural and mechanical arts.” Today, many are among the nation’s largest research universities. In this post I’ll share some thoughts about how they came about.
Let’s begin with conventional wisdom. Land-grant colleges “emerged from an idealistic concern for the adaptation of existing educational resources to a changing society . . . .” [1] Oddly, this somewhat grandiose explanation for the land-grants comes from John Simon, a historian who deftly investigated the politics behind the 1862 act that authorized such schools. He also recognized that the typical American didn’t have much truck with higher education in the mid-nineteenth century. One agricultural school was called the “Farmers’ High School” because the title “Farmers’ College” would sound too fancy.
Yet Simon’s statement reflects a still-prevailing image of the idealistic movement for land-grant colleges.
In the recent Cato Institute book Unprofitable Schooling [2] both Richard Vedder and I write about the Morrill Land-Grant Act. In his chapter Rich counters the myth that the act ”transformed the basic nature of American society” by fueling its productivity.[3] In my chapter, I investigate why the Morrill Act happened in the first place.[4]
I became involved in this project thanks to Henry Manne, a pioneer in the field of law and economics. Decades ago, he wrote an incisive article about nineteenth-century religious colleges, which he called “consumption goods” for religious-minded trustees. That is, the founders of such schools were carrying out their vision of teaching students religion; they were not responding to a demand by students for religious education.
In recent years Manne went back to thinking about higher education (thanks to a couple of Liberty Fund conferences). The land-grant universities bothered him because he was sure that they did not arise out of an idealistic concern of any sort. In a 2014 paper, Manne pointed out that the United States was rapidly industrializing well before 1862. So, he asked, “Who educated all the engineers, architects, chemists, metallurgists, financiers, accountants, lawyers, and other specialists necessary to operate such a ‘[complex industrial] system?”[5]
He wasn’t able to answer this question before he died in 2015. So I set out to do so. My research turned up all kinds of private education, such as apprenticeships (including training of engineers through large public works projects), carpentry schools, commercial schools for accounting, surveying, even navigation, and academies for less specialized white-collar jobs. I confirmed that there was plenty of technical education going on well before the Morrill Act.
I also discovered that the biggest push for agricultural education came from landowners in elite societies such as the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (a spin-off of Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society).
For one reason or another, these elite planters wanted colleges that would pursue agricultural improvement, rather than teach the classical education prevalent at the time. (My economist husband, Richard Stroup, suggests that the farming societies were not simply philanthropic; their members wanted to benefit their farms, as well as others’). Some of these landowners tried to start such schools but had trouble getting pupils.
Another force was a growing interest in mechanical arts. Following a pattern set in Great Britain, Mechanics’ Institutes had been formed by skilled workmen as fraternal organizations. They made some efforts to train future workers, but never got very far. (They had trouble getting pupils, too.) But like the agriculturalists, they influenced Justin Morrill, the U.S. senator who sponsored the act for agricultural and mechanical education.
The Morrill Act allowed each state in the Union (the South had seceded by this time) to obtain 30,000 acres of federal land and use them for schools teaching agricultural and mechanical arts—either to locate the schools on them or to build schools from the proceeds of land sales. But for years almost nothing happened; the grants provided no operating funds and there was little motivation to get started.
It wasn’t until the Hatch Act of 1887 and a second Morrill Act in 1890 that the federal government provided operating funds, and the process of starting schools in earnest began. By that time, United States’ output (GDP) had already surpassed that of its chief rival, Great Britain, a point Rich Vedder notes in his chapter. Furthermore, Vedder’s study of 30 entrepreneurs between 1789 and 1914 showed that 27 of the 30 had not gone to college.
In other words, land-grants came after the big industrialization push. In a way, they, like the religious colleges before them, were also “consumption goods” for those who promoted them.
[1] Todd J. Zywicki and Neal P. McCluskey, eds., Unprofitable Schooling: Examining Causes of, and Fixes for, America’s Broken Ivory Tower (Washington, D.C., Cato Institute, 2019).
[2] John Y. Simon, “The Politics of the Morrill Act.” Agricultural History 37, no. 2 (1963): 103-11, http://www.jstor.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/stable/3740782.
[3] Richard K. Vedder, “The Morrill Land-Grant Act: Fact and Mythology,” in Unprofitable Schooling, 31-63.
[4] Jane Shaw Stroup, “What Really Spurred the Morrill Act?” in Unprofitable Schooling, 13-29.
[5] Henry G. Manne, “How the Structure of Universities Determined the Fate of American Legal Education—A Trbute to Larry Ribstein, ” International Review of Law and Economics 38, Supplement (2014): 107-16, at 110.
Where the demand came from matters as historical fact, and historical fact matters in understanding human behavior, but otherwise does it matter why the land grant institutions came into existence?
I.e. they came and we have them. Their effectiveness probably varies by state (along with their athletic achievements). Isn’t the question whether the came along at the right time to increase the quality of human capital required by rapid growth of technology and science? Did the late 19th C require a different kind of technical education than the centuries when many scientists and technology creators were self-schooled or came from apprenticeships?
Next, do we have alternatives today, and if so, what and how much of the job could they assume?
Historians try to explain “change over time” (it’s something of a cliché), and economists offer a valuable tool: an understanding of the incentives facing decision-makers. Together, historians and economists can come up with major insights. Perhaps learning how and why the land-grants got started doesn’t matter all that much, but surely their history taken as a whole explains their strengths and weaknesses today and that seems important.
Changes in the twentieth century affected how they are today. Among those changes: population growth and demographic change; state legislatures’ funding; the prestige of a college education; prosperity; the demands of industry; war; the G.I. bill; federal research grants especially after World War II; agricultural politics; not to mention the internal dynamics of the schools as they coped with these forces (as suggested by Ramona Marotz-Baden below). All that strikes me as at least interesting and probably important.
All of the above, yes. And what Ramona Marotz-Baden wrote. So we do come back to the importance of origins, just as physicists and astronomers must understand the Big Bang.
I have taught at land grant and non-land grant universities and a private college, as no doubt have a number of those reading your blog. Faculty at all of these were “isolated” from bottom -line decisions. Hence their self-interests for advancement was mainly the regard their peers held them in, based mainly on their research. However, a mission of the land grant institutions is to feed this information to citizens of the state. Steve Gavazzi mentioned the Cooperative Extension Service. This is one way people in the state have access to experts in a variety of fields, and not just agricultural. Also, at some land grants, faculty are also required to present the results of their work and/or expertise to the citizens of the state via statewide publications, speaking engagements, workshops and the like. At the same time faculty and administration interests drive the push for new degrees, rarely those that the taxpayers would deem necessary.
I always like when the spotlight shines on land-grant universities! However, this piece misses the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 and thus neglects the role of Cooperative Extension Services. FYI this is something I argued at the Cato Institute when I presented back in February 2019 during the “Putting the Ivory Tower Back Together Again” conference https://www.cato.org/events/putting-ivory-tower-together-again-identifying-fixing-faults which I believe you Jane were invited to but could not attend. We had a very robust discussion about this topic during the conference and at dinner the preceding evening. I’m very passionate about the land-grant mission and would love to discuss with you in more detail sometime!
I would like to learn more about the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. Peter Drucker has listed the cooperative extension agent as one of the great (I think one of the five greatest!) forces in nineteenth-century innovation. (I have also read that Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears, was the person who actually came up with the idea of an agricultural extension agent). Much to research!
Good insight here regarding various types of schooling being more consumption goods for stakeholders than demand-driven. I think the same dynamic extends to many aspects of higher education today — especially athletics as the consumption goods of alumni and donors.
Athletics, yes indeed, David. Good point. I’ve often thought colleges and universities should just hire athletes, something like gladiators but with more job protection and benefits.