What percentage of adults went to college? How did it compare to the quality of the education today? Are there any surviving syllabuses or student notes that give an insight into what was being taught? For example, Thomas Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary and studied math, metaphysics and philosophy. Would his education be similar to majoring in the same topics today?
There are basically three ways to think about the difference between higher education in Colonial America and American higher education today.
The details of #2 and #3 are linked to the details of #1. That is, higher education in Colonial America was a way for men in power - and their sons - to make connections and learn the things that men in power knew. I've written some other answers about colonial education you may find relevant (u/UrAccountabilibuddy is my old handle) and I'm going to crib a bit from those answers.
Higher education in the American colonies is generally recognized as having started with a small endowment and donation from John Harvard to the Massachusetts Bay college that was later renamed in his honor. The school served young men (all white, save a few Indigenous men connected to the Harvard Indian College, until the 1900s) and operated more like a boarding school than a college as we think of it today.
As the various colonies got their feet under them and developed a need to formalize education systems, men in positions of power or access to power (i.e. non-disabled white men) in early America created spaces for formal education for their sons. So, just as Boston gave rise to Harvard, New Haven men established Yale, Princeton men established Princeton, etc. In total, nine institutions were established during the colonial era. They are:
A primary goal of these schools, was networking and they served their purpose. Classmates went on to lead churches, found law firms, businesses, and work in government together. Subsequent generation of men would send their sons to the same institutions they went to so that their sons could network with the sons of other men in power. The model of modern education, 8 years + 4 years + 4 years (grammar + high school + college), wouldn't be fully fleshed out until the 1900's. In the modern era, the last four years are mostly about a young person selecting a career and obtaining relevant background knowledge. In the 1800's, college was a place for young men to make connections and to polish off their learning; the average age at Harvard was 15 1/2. By the end of the century, it would shift up to 19 as the framework settled into one with three stages.
That said, these Colonial Colleges were not the only institutes of higher education in early America. Colleges for young women were established but they served a different purpose. A young white man went to a Colonial College because he was destined (or his father thought he was) to be, if not a great man, than a man of importance. A young white woman went to a woman's college because her future son was destined for greatness. Free Black men and women, simply did not attend the Colonial Colleges and enslaved Black men and women may have been on the campus of a Colonial College but they were there because their enslaver, or their enslaver's son was attending, or the college was using their labor. Free Black people instead, attended schools like Oberlin, which quickly established itself a rigorous college for non-white male (and female) students as it followed a classical curriculum not unlike that seen at Harvard. While Oberlin did enroll white male students, they were more likely to lack political connections and specific education required to get into the colonial colleges. A man with more humble aspirations, or more limited means, might go to one of the land grant colleges that were founded in various waves during the 1800s. To be sure, not all of the Colonial Colleges are held in the same high esteem in the modern era which has a lot to do with endowments and how various states support colleges within its borders.
Each of the Colonial Colleges had its own admissions criteria, although there were overlaps as they all focused on the same type of education and were shaped by the founders' experiences with and understanding of British universities; The constant across all of the Colleges regarding admissions was an expectation students would know Latin backwards, forwards, inside out, and upside down. The differences often came down to which text they were asked to translate. This commitment to Latin as an essential component for admission would endure until the late 19th century. Nicholas Murray Butler had to study with a private teacher for at least a year before being allowed to take the entrance exams to Columbia in 1875 because his public high school in New Jersey hadn't offered Latin. (Butler would become one of the strongest advocates for standardizing high school curriculum based on his own experiences.)
The course of study was the classical "educated man's" curriculum and looked very similar no matter where he went: Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, some math, some science, and religious studies. The general sentiment of the era was that the brain was like a muscle; young men who wanted to be smart adults studied the things that smart men knew, not because they might use the knowledge as an adult, but knowing those things would make them better at the things they were going to do. That said, there were some distinctly American touches from the very beginning. Students (again, all male, all white save a handful of exceptions) were accepted not only because they passed the entrance exam, which was more recitation than pen and paper, but because they could afford tuition, and were deemed sufficiently worthy of carrying the name of the College. So, whereas in the modern era one picks a college because it offers what the young person wants to study, during the Colonial Era, if one was going to go to a college, one went where connections could be and needed to be made.
Once the colleges were established (meaning boys from NYC could go to King's College [Columbia] instead of traveling to Harvard - though most of the students were from the local community), they played a significant role in social advancement for the sons of men with financial and political power in the surrounding city, towns, and villages. It was a deeply masculine, deeply exclusive (about 1% of the population had a college education) space devoted to connections and a particular kind of knowledge.
Very few men (and essentially zero women) attended college in the colonies that would later become America, and attendence was especially rare pre-1750. For one, your options were very limited. For two, it was relatively expensive or otherwise inaccessible. For a third, formal education on that level wasn't seen as a necessity for most men, and it wasn't really considered at all for women (the first female to graduate college in America did so well into the 19th century, though the first female seminary school opened in Philly in 1742 and later became a college).
In 1636 Massachusetts Bay Colony voted to create a college, and that year it became the first in British North America. It was properly named a few years later for its primary benefactor, Rev. John Harvard, who left a large portion of his estate, including his incredible 400 book library, in his will for the benefit of the college. It had a simple mission - educate and prepare ministers to lead the communities popping up due to the rapidly growing population of New England. It wouldn't be until after the first constitution was passed for Massachusetts in 1780 - the first document referencing it as a "university" rather than a college - that they started their now world famous law school (1782), though they did teach a small variety of topics to their early clergymen students. At first the focus, of course, was on the scripture and teaching others the righteous path to salvation. That first year 8 students attended courses on divinity, theology, and the ancient languages (Latin and Greek).
The College of William and Mary came about from a royal charter in the form of a Letter of Patent from King William and Queen Mary, issued in 1693, and became the second school of higher learning in colonial America. It, too, started with an emphasis on religion;
Forasmuch as our well-beloved and faithful subjects, constituting the General Assembly of our Colony of Virginia, have had it in their minds, and have proposed to themselves, to the end that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God; to make, found and establish a certain place of universal study, or perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences, consisting of one President, six Masters or Professors, and an hundred scholars more or less, according to the ability of the said college, and the statutes of the same...
They also mandated that all students be members of the Anglican Church (Harvard was for Puritans, of course), and they wanted it to polish off the learning of the rapidly growing class of gentlemen in the colony, many of them having attended private tutors first, as well as to function as an Indian School intended to help the "heathens" learn the culture, customs, and ways of Anglo society (and integrate them into Anglo ways hoping they would inspire and lead their fellow Native men and women to do the same), which was also a goal of Harvard in the 17th century. Neither did a very good job in that regard. This wasn't just a copy of Harvard, per se. The first plans for a college in Virginia happened about a decade after establishing Jamestown and it was intended to be at Henrico. They even set land aside for the school there (1618) but before anything could be funded and constructed, conflict happened (1622) in which the Powhatan allied tribes launched an attack and killed about 350 colonists. Henrico (or Henricus) was quickly abandoned, then destroyed, and two years later Virginia would become Royal and lose proprietary status, suspending the dreams of building a proper school for the colony until 1693. By 1729 the school was really hopping (relatively speaking) and they had a full staff... of nine. A President, Usher, Writing Master, and six professors. It wouldn't be until 1779 that they made really big changes that begin to form something recognizable as similar to our idea of college. It was largely inspired by Jefferson who, as a delegate from Albemarle County, had introduced legislation early in 1779 to allow a "More General Diffusion of Knowledge" by shaking things up at the school. Later that same year, in December, then Governor Jefferson (elected June 1st 1779) oversaw the adoption of several of his ideas through resolutions passed by the W&M Board of Visitors, a body that Jefferson also sat on, and agreed to by the college president, Reverend James Madison (not that James Madison). First, they dropped the divinity program and the two professorships attached to it. They also left the position of Indian School Master vacant, effectively ending that effort. Then they added the first law program in the colonies, appointing Jefferson's legal mentor George Wythe as the first professor "of law and police" at any of the colonial colleges (where one of his first students was the future Supreme Court Justice John Marshall). They also began to add other professorships to replace divinity and enacted the first elective style college programs at any colonial college. By 1803 they had added anatomy and medicine, political economy, modern languages, history, and fine arts, and they had also added courses in law of nature and nations to existing professorships, with most of these programs and courses coming in 1779. Yet with all this revolution in modernizing and expanding education it would still take 139 years before the first female W&M student attended her first class (1918). Even worse, it was 172 years before Hulon Willis became the first black man to attend (1951) for his Masters in Education and another 16 years after that before the first black female arrived on campus (1967). In the 1850s George Greenhow, a W&M custodian and free black man, learned to read from a student for whom his wife did laundry. He subsequently bragged of being "the only Negro ever educated at William and Mary" and so one has to realize that there was only a specific "type" of human that could attend higher education centers at all for a very, very long time and in much of the country, let alone back when they were colonies.
Benjamin Franklin had actually proposed a similarly practical school that has much in common with modern colleges, writing in a 1751 proposal;
That the House be furnished with a Library (if in the Country, if in the Town, the Town Libraries may serve) with Maps of all Countries, Globes, some mathematical Instruments, and Apparatus for Experiments in Natural Philosophy, and for Mechanics; Prints, of all Kinds, Prospects, Buildings, Machines, &c.
A diversified pool of resources for practical education.
That to keep them in Health, and to strengthen and render active their Bodies, they be frequently exercis’d in Running, Leaping, Wrestling, and Swimming &c.
Collegiate sports.
That the boarding Scholars diet together, plainly, temperately, and frugally.
Ever been to a dining hall? Frugal and communal are definitely words I'd use.
Cont'd