From the 1750s through the 1820s, America's nascent professional class saw a rise in standardized educational practices attuned to their respective fields, conducted at an increasing number of institutions of higher education. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a number of colleges added course work in law, medicine, and a more systematized theological training. In the years after the Revolution, that progress grew into a larger number of specialized schools and programs.
By the mid-eighteenth century young men wishing to pursue a professional life in medicine, the law, or the clergy had essentially two choices: return to the mother country or pursue an apprenticeship under the tutelage of a master. Despite the increase in the number of American colleges in the eighteenth century, the colonial professoriate continued to be dominated by various sects' clergy, emphasizing liberal arts study and avoiding particular training for a profession. Numerous colonials took medical degrees at Edinburgh or read law at the Inns of Court, gaining both professional knowledge and personal contacts that assisted them for the remainders of their professional lives. Likewise, returning to the mother country was the only way that a prospective clergyman of the Church of England from the colonies could receive final instructions and ordination. But education in the Old World had drawbacks, too. Studies in Britain or Europe were expensive, time-consuming, and, in the view of worried colonial parents, dangerous. The alternative was apprenticeship. Like artisans, young men pursuing entrance into the medical and legal fields followed patterns of apprenticeship, learning the "art and mystery" of their chosen field by serving for a period of time under a master, progressing from doing chores and routine tasks into their own practice of the profession. Although the apprenticeship system has long been characterized as a poor education, it actually provided young lawyers and doctors with skills that served them well within their colonial communities.
The first American medical school was proposed by Philadelphia physician John Morgan in 1765. Morgan, a veteran of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) who subsequently took a medical degree at Edinburgh, called for a program that would be a part of the College of Philadelphia (later, the University of Pennsylvania), judging the liberal arts to be an integral aspect of a doctor's training. Two years later a similar plan was launched in New York, affiliated with King's College (Columbia). Each school required matriculates to hold a bachelor's degree or proficiency in Latin, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Over three years of study, students took courses with professors and gained practical knowledge through apprenticeships or work in hospitals, eventually taking comprehensive examinations and receiving the doctorate of medicine. The two medical schools transformed American medical education, offering degrees that would set apart their alumni and mark the rise of the medical profession in the colonies. By 1776 the two schools had graduated a total of forty-nine physicians. In other colonies, calls for the creation of professional education opportunities failed or met serious resistance. Virginians demanded that the College of William and Mary offer training in medicine and law, but attempts failed until the removal of imperial controls during the Revolution.
The years immediately following American independence saw a rise and proliferation of professional educational endeavors in the new American states. Collegiate legal education, particularly addressing the need for training and codification on the new American system of laws, began in 1779, when the College of William and Mary appointed George Wythe as its first professor of law and police. In 1789 James Wilson began teaching law at the University of Pennsylvania, and James Kent was appointed professor of law at Columbia College in 1794. Harvard received an endowment for legal training in the 1781 will of Isaac Royall but was unable to secure the proceeds until 1815, when it appointed Isaac Parker as the first Royall Professor of Law; two years later Harvard established a School of Law, granting bachelor of law degrees at the successful completion of three years' study. Six students graduated in the class of 1820.
Despite colleges' moving into new roles in educating young professionals, much of the most important work in the area continued to be under the supervision of a single determined master, operating without the support of a college or university or a charter. Tapping Reeve began his career as a legal educator in 1774, taking in apprentices in his home in Litchfield, Connecticut. By 1784 he was able to construct a small building to house the Litchfield Law School. Known for his thorough and systematic instruction, Reeve and the instructors who later joined him offered classroom lectures in various areas of the law, as well as providing prospective lawyers with access to debating societies, moot courts, and regular examinations. The school offered a comprehensive legal training for its numerous students, many of whom went on to serve on the bench and in the local, state, and federal governments.
The post-Revolutionary period ushered in numerous collegiate plans for the education of young ministers. Most pre-Revolutionary colonial clergymen took bachelor's degrees at colleges and then stayed on for further education. By the late 1760s Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey (Princeton) had established professorships of divinity. The minister's training was often completed by serving an apprenticeship, much as his contemporaries pursued careers as master artisans, doctors, or lawyers. In the case of the theology student, he studied under the supervision of a senior clergyman, reading Bible studies, biblical languages, Judeo-Christian history, and homiletics, and learned the role of the pastor firsthand by following his supervisor on his ministerial rounds. The diversification of American religion in the early national period likewise showed diversity in training, experience, and intelligence among the clergymen. The Methodist and Baptist movements emphasized personal conviction and commitment far more than formal training and education, and that educational difference allowed for much larger numbers of young men to pursue the ministry, particularly in expanding frontiers where college and theological training were not available. Likewise, the number of graduates of long-established colleges who pursued the ministry dropped significantly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to Samuel Eliot Morison, 52 percent of Harvard graduates between 1642 and 1721 became ministers; fewer than 20 percent of those who graduated between 1782 and 1804 pursued a career in the church.