How a Scottish steel baron changed the American education system forever
Over one hundred years ago, Andrew Carnegie granted ten million dollars to completely reshape the education system. Twice.
If you’ve ever taken a class at an American high school or college, you’re familiar with credits. Each class you took granted you a certain number of credits (typically three for a college course). If you earned enough of them, you got a diploma! This wasn’t always the case.
For most of America's history, what it meant to graduate high school or college entirely depended on where you went. It was chaos. The wild west.
What college you could be admitted into entirely depended on what courses you took in secondary school. Even then, two high schools teaching the exact same subject could be teaching them over widely different amounts. One student could take algebra every single day and receive the same amount of credit as someone who took it only two days a week. Two students could both be taking Latin with one studying Virgil and be admitted into a college and another studying Levy and be barred from the same institution. Also, students could be admitted at any age without graduating high school.
Admissions requirements for Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, and Stanford from 1903 (From Broome 1903).
There were efforts leading into the 20th century to homogenize secondary education and create a standardized “unit” of education. Real change didn’t happen until Andrew Carnegie, or at least his money, stepped in.
In 1905, Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He gave ten million dollars to the foundation to establish a pension for college professors (still in existence today as the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America). This would allow much older faculty to retire and new, younger faculty to be hired. But in order for a college to get the free money, they had to follow a few rules.
First off, they had to be a college. To be a college, you needed at least six full time professors, offer a four year course in liberal arts or sciences, and required that a student to be admitted must have completed four years of high school course work.
To prepare for college, a student must complete 14 units or credits. To earn a credit, a student would have to meet for 120 hours in a classroom at least five periods a week. For those of you who get three credits for a college class, one credit is for the time spent in the classroom and two are for the hours spent outside of it.
Adaptation of this new system spread like wildfire. Who wouldn’t want some free money? It was so popular, Carnegie gave an additional ten million to the fund. This is the system that lives on today.
While this was a much needed boon for a discombobulated education system, it didn’t come without its flaws. The credit earned is for how much time you sat in a classroom, not how much you learned. This also effectively froze the education system in 1906. The sciences have all dramatically grown and changed in the last century, and yet we spend the same amount of time in high school in each class—one year for each science.
So how do we change the system? While the Carnegie Unit was once good and saved the education system from chaos, it needs to change again. Education has dramatically changed in the last century. Students can now take classes online for free learning entire subjects yet receiving no “credit” for what they learned. The new unit should measure learning not physical presence. But like the generations before us, reform will not come easy. Perhaps money could once again pave the way. Perhaps Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or some other billionaire could drop ten billion dollars on the problem. It would be one hell of a legacy.
Sources:
Edwin Broome. A historical and critical discussion of college admission requirements (1903)
Tompkins, Ellsworth, and Walter H. Gaumnitz. "The Carnegie Unit: Its Origin, Status, and Trends. Bulletin, 1954, No. 7." Office of Education, US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1954)