It is true that education was severely neglected in the states which rebelled. Having mostly newly established colleges doesn't change that fact and even your list shows that there were 83 in those states compared to 123 in the rest of the nation. Hence you are incorrect.
Most of those MS colleges probably didn't survive the War and even if they did they were mediocre at best even today MS colleges are hardly a hotbed of scholarly production.
William and Mary was the only college which could even approach Columbia, Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and its existence does not disprove my contention.
You simply have not established that gratuitous and unsubstantiated slander. As I have show, the six southern colonies out of the original thirteen had 7 out of the 16 pre-revolutionary colleges in the United States. The southern state of Virginia also has the highest concentration of prerevolutionary colleges with 3 operating before 1776. Thus it may be said with full accuracy that the south started out on virtually equal footing in the number of colleges. By 1850 the addition of new colleges in the south outpaced all but the two most populous northern states, which seems to indicate that the south added colleges AT A FASTER RATE to their already-existing colonial college system than the north did.
Having mostly newly established colleges doesn't change that fact and even your list shows that there were 83 in those states compared to 123 in the rest of the nation.
Your figures are wrong as usual. There were 118 colleges south of the Mason-Dixon line in 1850. That leaves 114 colleges in the northern states.
Most of those MS colleges probably didn't survive the War
First, you do not know that with anything even remotely approaching certainty given that you have no statistical data to offer (read: you pulled it out of your @$$). Second, even if it were true the observation remains irrelevant and inconsequential to a discussion of the number of colleges BEFORE the war.
William and Mary was the only college which could even approach Columbia, Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and its existence does not disprove my contention.
More garbage. You are using the modern 21st century concept of university "prestige" to weigh their 19th century status when such prestige was not measured as it is today nor understood on the same level of comparison. Among the modern "prestigious" universities that were located in the south though at the time of the war are W&M, University of Virginia, Duke (known as the Union Institute back then), Georgetown, St. Johns, and Emory. That said, I could care less what US News and World Distort says about the ivy league schools and would never send a kid to any one of them today because they all teach left wing garbage.