In the beginning of higher education in what would become the United States, there was one college, and it was called Harvard, and it was founded in 1636 in a place called Newtowne, a name that did not please the men who engineered the founding and who had for the most part graduated from Cambridge University, and so they arranged to have the ground beneath the college’s foundation re-baptized “to tell their posterity whence they came.”

Harvard’s mission—for which it had a clear field until Yale came along in 1701—was to produce in the colonies what Cambridge had produced in the old country: orthodox Congregationalist ministers; harriers of Quakers, Baptists, and Papists. And its entrance requirements, while narrow, were appropriate to a curriculum that included no arts, no history that wasn’t ancient, no literature that wasn’t available in Hebrew, Greek (the Gospels, not Aristotle),
or Latin.

“When any scholar is able to read Tully or such like classical Latin Author ex tempore, and make and speake true Latin in verse and prose, . . . and decline perfectly the paradigms of nounes and verbes in ye Greeke tongue, then may hee bee admitted into ye College.”

Promulgated in the 1640s, that became the unmoving standard for American colleges well into the 18th century, when Columbia, Brown, Yale, Williams, and others were persuaded of the practical wisdom of adding “vulgar arithmetic” (anything short of algebra) to the Greek-Latin dyad. Harvard followed suit in 1807. A short time later, French joined the list at some colleges (likely honoring France’s support of the colonies during the Revolutionary War); and then—over many decades—geography, English grammar, histories of eras that antedated the fall of Rome, Shakespeare and Milton, and English composition. It took Syracuse University, however, in 1873, to dare add “natural philosophy,” or science; and soon Harvard, never to be outdone in follow-up innovation, offered a choice of tests in botany, physics, chemistry, or descriptive astronomy.

The most profound changes in college admission, however—the ones that made the SAT, ACT, AP tests, legacies, U.S. News, Kaplan, sleepless nights, tears beside the mailbox, the summer tour of the Northeast or the Pac-12, and all the rest possible—were not the work of any of the eminent private institutions that ruled admission standards into the post-Civil War era, but of the University of Michigan.

Founded in 1817 with broadly democratic responsibilities (the university was begun by a French Catholic priest, and its early board of directors was a deliberately constructed Noah’s ark, featuring every Christian denomination that had to that time planted itself in the Wolverine State), Michigan was centrally concerned with educating as many native sons as were qualified to sit for college degrees. In order to identify these candidates expeditiously, the university broke with a rule, in force since 1636, that applicants had to appear at the college to which they were applying, there to be examined by faculty. Michigan, instead, chose to dispatch faculty from Ann Arbor to secondary schools across the state, where they administered entrance exams until all comers had been served. Seeing the revenue opportunities—tuition was pretty much all that separated colleges of the era from bankruptcy—other institutions followed suit, even in the elite East. And then in 1870 Michigan declared that graduates of many of the state’s public high schools didn’t have to take entrance exams, but could turn up in Ann Arbor on the day before classes started, display their diplomas or an appropriate letter from their high school principal, and be admitted to study.

“Certification,” as the process became known, because certain high schools were certified as reliable, was quickly adopted by state universities such as Indiana and Wisconsin, and by Columbia, the dim cousin within the nascent Ivy League family, which year after year had its head handed to it, enrollment-wise, by the blue-collar College of the City of New York, and so saw the advantages of any process that would speed students directly from high school to its bursar’s office. In tonier precincts, however, which dominated higher education, the notion that a high school diploma equipped an individual to enter college was flatly rejected.

The argument—a cultural, geographical, and intellectual fracas—went on for decades, replete with public meetings, private correspondence, arm twisting, sniping, alliance forming, and alliance shattering. Eventually, everyone came to their senses (predictably, the last holdouts were Harvard, Yale, and Princeton). The first national college admission test was administered by the newly formed College Entrance Examination Board in June 1901. Nine hundred and seventy-three candidates turned up. By 1925, the number of annual examinations administered had reached 72,418. “The race for numbers is over, and . . . the race for quality has begun,” one college president declared not long afterward.

Our story of a day at the 2016 races begins here.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum