Postsecondary Curriculum, History of

The history of postsecondary curriculum in the United States refers to the continuities and changes in the formal courses of study offered by colleges and universities and numerous related educational institutions from 1636 to the present. Over five centuries, it has been characterized both by rigidity and resilience. A central part of the story is the requirements and options students face in completing the undergraduate bachelor's degree. On closer inspection, the richness of the curriculum or, more accurately, the curriculain U.S. higher education has been the number and variety of professional and advanced degrees, such as the MD, the MBA, the JD, the MA, and the PhD conferred by colleges and universities. And, since 1960, community colleges' 2-year associates' degree programs have become integral to the national curricular profile. An obvious but incomplete source of historical information is the official catalogue of courses typically published by each institution annually. However, a complete conceptualization of the postsecondary curricula is to see the official course requirements and listings as the skeleton, which then is fleshed out by the actual teaching and learning that took place within this formal structure over time.

The rigidity of the typical collegiate course of study from the late 18th through the 19th centuries is illustrated by the endurance of a “classical course” to define a liberal arts education. It emphasized daily recitations in ancient languages, logic, rhetoric, and mathematicsas affirmed by the Yale Report of 1828. This collegiate pedagogy aimed to have undergraduates acquire the “furniture of the mind.” In contrast, the resilience and expansion of the postsecondary curricula in U.S. colleges and universities was best expressed in the motto attributed to the benefactor of the new Cornell University in the 1860s: “I would found an institution where any one could find instruction in any study.” The resulting dynamic has been a continual push-and-pull of action and reaction, often debated in faculty meetings across the country and ultimately resolved by the enrollment choices of new generations of students.

The absence of a centralized national ministry of education in the United States allowed each institution to add or delete subjects and courses. So, although by custom and inertia, most colleges offered similar topics in the bachelor of arts course of study into the early 20th century, one also finds on the margins a proliferation of innovations both within and across institutions. Innovation often gravitated toward demands for utilitarian studies. Hence, one finds an increasing number of options, including “scientific schools” and its bachelor of sciences degree, or a liberal arts course that no longer required classical languages, leading to the new PhB, or “bachelor of philosophy” degree.

Since the early 20th century, the greatest source of innovation and diversification has been in the addition of new professional fields and advanced degrees. Absorption of medicine and law into the university degree structure, including coordination with the undergraduate studies and prerequisites, [Page 676]was an exemplary development. Universities also added such new professional fields as agriculture, forestry, business, teacher education, and engineering. Many applied fields gained sustained support from the 1862 Morrill Act and subsequent federal legislation. The social and behavioral science disciplines of political science, economics, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology were daring innovations in the late 19th century. Romance languages along with English and U.S. literature also signaled a revision of what constituted the arts and sciences core of the university. In recent decades, the development of such new fields as statistics, computer science, women's studies, African American studies, and biochemistry has extended this curricular process.

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