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.
The 11 confederate states plus the three border states that, at least in part, supported the confederacy or divided on the issue had a total of 116 colleges between them. It could also be noted that at the time of the war there were 34 states. From this we may observe that:
1. The 11 CSA states made up 32% of the total number of states yet had 36% of the colleges.
2. The non-border yankee states made up 59% of the total number of states yet had only 50% of the colleges.
Put another way, the south had a disproportionately higher number of colleges to its total number of states than the north, which ran a disproportionate deficit.
I don't have to establish it it is not even a controversial topic. Having from the South I am very familiar with its cultural shortcomings as well as its greatest contribution to American culture, music, in which it has no peer. My love for the South and its people is not to be surpassed merely because I refuse to except the Insurrectionists and Slavery as adding to the Good when they were a disaster for it. That is the same kind of thinking that would have me defending my present state, Illinois, by defending the Daley Machine and the corrupt clique which rules it.
Its very late acceleration in founding colleges merely demonstrates how far behind it had falled after near equality. Apparently some in the ruling class realized that without doing so the region would have no chance to win independence if their desire for secession ever succeeded. I would also presume that the number of students in each region was not close to being equal.
This inferiority was partially a result of the lack of public schools there and the disdain which the Planter class had for education. It remained throughout our history
and still has its effects today as the best Universities are in the North. It would be debatable whether any from the South would make the Top Ten list in any department. This is not to say there are NO excellent schools there certainly Texas, Tulane, GTech, Duke and NC can be called that. And Forrest MacDonald puts the U of Ala at the top of the list in American History in my opinion being our greatest living historian.
My opinion regarding MS colleges is definitely pulled outta my @ss but I contend that that is good enough. There is no reason for me to research it as I am very familiar with the quality of the schools there now and do not believe they declined. Comparing raw numbers shows little at any rate since some had 80 students and some 1000. Why don't you show me that there were more students per capita in the South than the North. I won't even quibble about the effect of immigration on the North's numbers.
A good measure of a university's quality and impact throughout our history is the number of movers and shakers who attended it and where the rich send their children. This measure showed the same thing in 1790 that it does today: Harvard, Yale and Princeton led the pack. You are deluded if you think that the Schools you mentioned do not ape the left-wing views of their betters. In some cases they are worse. Duke takes second place to no one for Loony Left idocrination.