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For the first 200 or so years after Harvard, the first college in America, was founded in 1636, students either studied the classics or technical topics such as science or agriculture. But in the mid-1800s, leaders of schools including Harvard and Yale, concerned that wealthy families were starting to see college as useless, began to embrace a curriculum that both prepared students for the working world and gave them a broad education in a number of topics. In 1869, Charles W. Eliot, who was soon appointed president of Harvard, laid out his vision for what he called "a practical education" in a piece in The Atlantic.

“The fact is, that the whole tone and spirit of a good college ought to be different in kind from that of a good polytechnic or scientific school,” he wrote. “In the college, the desire for the broadest culture, for the best formation and information of the mind, the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without any ulterior objects, the love of learning and research for their own sake, should be the dominant ideas,” he wrote.

Eliot spent much of the next 40 years making Harvard into a place where students could get a "practical education," which combined exploration and abstract learning with the acquisition of useful skills.

At the time, a college education was only accessible to the most elite: In 1940, only 6 percent of males had completed four years of college, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics; fewer than half of Americans had finished eighth grade.

But college attainment rates began to grow steadily after World War II, when the G.I. Bill sent millions of returning soldiers to college and helped promote a more democratic notion of who could get a college degree. (It is important to note, however, that the effects of the G.I. Bill did not fall equally to all Americans, and many black veterans, particularly in the South, did not benefit at all.) College completion rates rose from 6 percent of males to 12 percent by 1962. Women and minorities began to attend college in greater numbers, too. These trends accelerated in the later part of the 20th century and early 21st: College enrollment climbed from 25 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds in 1967 to 41 percent in 2012.

But as more students began attending college, the new institutions that sprang up to educate students didn’t have the endowments of the older schools. And as colleges began to compete against one another to attract students and faculty, they started spending more money on things like sports teams, new buildings, and personnel. Tuition and fees have gone up 1,120 percent since 1978 alone, according to Bloomberg.

Today, affordability is the factor most challenging students’ ability to go to college. And as students struggle with how to pay for school, many are finding they don’t have as much time for—let alone want to spend their limited money on—“learning and research for their own sake.” Fearing the specter of loans hanging over them forever, many students try to finish college as quickly as possible, live at home, and work one or two jobs during school to save money. Their main concerns aren't whether they have time to take all of the fascinating and varied classes in the course catalog, but instead how they can get all their credit hours in without going so deep into debt that they'll never escape. Though they've been told that a college education is what they need to succeed in America, the stress of paying for that education challenges their ability to benefit from it.