UNITS

The National Center for Education Statistics says more than four thousand two hundred colleges and universities award degrees. These include two-year schools as well as four-year schools.

The oldest institution of higher learning in the country is Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was established in sixteen thirty-six as Harvard College. Massachusetts was an English colony at the time.

The school was named for a Puritan religious leader. John Harvard gave the college all his books and half his property when he died.

At first, Harvard had one teacher and nine students. Today it has almost twenty thousand students. Nearly four thousand of them this past year were from outside the United States.

There are fourteen schools at Harvard. They include Harvard College and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard College is the undergraduate division of the university and Radcliffe is a former college for women.

So Harvard came first. Later, in seventeen eighty, the Massachusetts Constitution went into effect and officially recognized Harvard as a university.