Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Anthony J. Drexel was a banker from the age of thirteen. Born in Philadelphia in 1826, he began learning the rudiments of banking at the firm started by his father. At the age of 21 he was named a member of the firm, Drexel & Company, which became successful with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago by the time of the Civil War. When his father died in 1863 Drexel closed the offices in the west and changed the name of the New York branch to Drexel Winthrop.
In 1871 Drexel, while retaining his other interests, joined in a new partnership with John Pierpont Morgan, which was named Drexel, Morgan & Co. Based in New York, the merchant’s bank became one of the most powerful in the country during the boom years of the railroads. During the fiscal crisis of 1877, Drexel Morgan underwrote the US Army’s entire payroll when a panicked Congress failed to do so, helping to restore confidence in the economy.
With the dizzying advance of technology in the decades following the Civil War, Drexel, who was involved in the financing of emerging new industries, recognized the need to improve the manner in which young adults were prepared to take their part in business. Drexel came to believe that working experience was an integral part of preparing to enter business, and that the education process should include practical hands-on experience.
What later became known as co-operative education, in which work in a field related to an academic major is awarded credit, was Drexel’s vision. In 1891 Drexel endowed the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry with $3 million of his personal fortune (about $80 million today). Drexel’s new school was open to all regardless of race, religious beliefs, or gender, a considerable innovation for the time.
In 1919, long after its founder died in 1893, Drexel Institute formalized the process of recognizing co-operative education, and Drexel’s personal belief in education through experience, which began when he learned banking beginning at the age of thirteen, remained a focus of the institution of higher learning he founded. Drexel became the Drexel Institute of Technology in 1936, changing its name to Drexel University in 1970.