Useless Facts On Different Colleges
When Harvard College was founded in 1636 it was surrounded by a tall stockade to keep prowling wolves and hostile Indians.
John Harvard did not found Harvard University. Harvard, a Puritan minister, simply left his library of 400 books to the college when he died in 1638. The college itself has been founded two years earlier and was first known as Cambridge.
Yale was founded by Harvard men. In 1700 ten educators, nine of them Harvard graduates, met in Killingworth (now Clinton), Connecticut, for the purpose of establishing a college. When it was begun, Yale was not known as Yale but as the Collegiate School of Connecticut. Only in 1718, thanks to donations from Elihu Yale, was it given its present name.
The University of Calcutta has 175,000 students.
According to a survey taken by the Standard And Poor Corporation in 1976, 30 percent of the leading executives of the United States Corporations attended the following twelve colleges: Harvard leads the list and is followed in order, by New York University, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Columbia, Northwestern, City College of New York, Princeton, University of Wisconsin, MIT, and University of Illinois.
The famous goldfish-swallowing fad was started at Harvard University in 1938 by a student who downed a fish on a lark, then was challenged to perform the same feat in public. Hundreds of students witnessed the performance, and the fad caught on. The first goldfish-swallowing record was set the following year by a student from Middlesex College who down 67 live goldfish. In 1967 the fad was revived just long enough for a St. Joseph's College undergrad to consume 199 hapless fish.
There are fewer than a million college graduates each year in the United States.
North Texas State University gives a degree in “dance-band arts”.
Dartmouth was the only college in New England to remain open during the entire Revolutionary War.