At the date when this will was signed, July 9, 1790, the following colleges were in operation in the United States:
| Harvard (1636). | Hampden-Sidney (1776). |
| Yale (1701). | Washington and Lee (1782). |
| College of William and Mary (1692). | Washington University (1782). |
| University of Pennsylvania (1749). | Dickinson (1783). |
| Columbia (1754). | St. Johns (1784). |
| Princeton (1746). | Nashville (1785). |
| Brown University (1764). | Georgetown (1789). |
| Dartmouth (1769). | University of North Carolina (1789). |
| Rutgers (1770). |
In Yale College we find the following courses offered for the session of 1702:
In Dartmouth College, for the session of 1811, the following courses were offered:
Sophomore—Latin and Greek classics; logic; geography; arithmetic; geometry; trigonometry; algebra; conic sections; surveying; belles-lettres; criticism.
Junior—Latin and Greek classics; geometry; natural and moral philosophy; astronomy.
Senior—Metaphysics; theology; natural and political law.The following courses were offered at Harvard for the session of 1825:
Sophomore—Solid geometry; English history; Cicero; analytic geometry; rhetoric.
Junior—Logic; moral philosophy; chemistry; Tacitus; Homer; calculus; mechanics; electricity.
Senior—Intellectual philosophy; astronomy; Butler's analogy; political economy; chemistry; natural philosophy.By comparing even the latest and most advanced of these courses of study, one will see that the best high schools of the present day are nearly the equivalent of the institutions from which Washington could have drawn his ideals, and that a university that now begins where the best colleges of his time left off, would surely be the equal of all that he could have hoped to see in his national university. Such institutions we now have in every state and in almost every city.
During the early years of our national existence it might have been possible to bring into one institution the greater part of the
