Secondary..................

     "Our country is to be a land of colleges," Reverend Absalom Peters, a friend of colleges including Williams and Amherst, remarked in 1851.  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Rudolph writes in The American College and University: A History (1962), England had four colleges for a population of 23 million, while the State of Ohio alone had thirty-seven colleges for a population of 3 million.  Unlike countries around the world that quickly put all their universities under centralized state control, the United States evolved a unique diversity of large and small, public and private institutions.  At first, colleges multiplied because each Protestant denomination in each colony wanted its own.  Reformers founded separate colleges for women, blacks, even Indians.  Founding or growing a college was always useful to someone, somewhere, whether local political leaders, philanthropists, subcultures, sects, or ethnic groups.  Colleges were built to further these interests - student demand was always secondary.
-Anya Kamenetz, as excerpted from DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education