In 1883 Illinois passed an “Act to secure all children the benefit of an elementary education.” Between then and 1910 the compulsory education law was amended seven times. The Act was seemingly effective: by 1930 approximately 97 percent of the 7–13 age cohort attended school. But what is of greater interest is the increasing level of school attendance of children over 14. As Table 1 indicates, for the 14–15 age cohort, school attendance of native white children of native parentage increased from 80.6 percent to 96.3 percent; for native white children of foreign or mixed parentage, from 66.3 to 94.4 percent; for white foreign-born children, from 54.9 to 94.3 percent; and for blacks from 80.1 to 93.1 percent. A similar upward trend, equally as dramatic, was exhibited by the 16–17 age cohort: for native white children of native parentage school attendance increased from 41.4 percent in 1910 to 64.2 percent in 1930; for native white children of foreign or mixed parentage increased from 22.6 to 54.7 percent; for white foreign-born children, from 12.9 to 50.4 percent; and for blacks, from 38.9 to 56.9 percent. While it is true that for both age cohorts significant differences existed in 1910, and some differences still existed in 1930, what is perhaps more striking is the identical upward tendency in all groups. The question then, is, why? Why did more and more children, irrespective of population group, stay on longer and longer at school?

The relations between the origins of public educational systems and school attendance remain far from clear. For instance, the proportion of children receiving some sort of formal education did not increase automatically with the extension and elaboration of school facilities. Carl Kaestle has argued that proportionally as many children attended school in New York City in 1750 as in 1850. Elsewhere he and Maris Vinovskis have shown the surprisingly high rate of attendance of children in rural New York and Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century, prior to the so-called common school revival. And our own work has demonstrated that in at least one industrializing city the upward curve of school attendance among adolescent young people was not secular. School attendance, of course, was a differential process. It varied according to place, age, sex, class and ethnicity. However, the exact nature of that variation still has not been delineated. In an earlier article Katz showed why it is important to understand patterns of school attendance and outlined some of the principal ones he had uncovered in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1851 and 1861. Davey developed the analysis much further in his study of working-class school attendance in Hamilton in the latter part of the nineteenth-century. However, both examinations used entirely descriptive statistics, primarily cross-tabulation, and it is possible that some of the relations we uncovered appeared significant only because we had not controlled for other variables. Moreover, our method made it difficult for us to rank with certainty the importance of the various factors that affected school attendance. One major study by Kaestle and Vinovskis has attempted to unravel the complexities of school attendance with multivariate analysis, but their results are rather inconclusive. Indeed, the principal finding is the rather obvious point that age was the most important factor.

On September 2, 1858 fifteen thousand persons converged on a small village in central New York to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone of a new college. In the ceremonies at the building site the college's president, Amos Brown, explained the new institution's name.