Soon each of these schools was competing with the others by sending off its graduates to top universities to prepare for careers as gifted professionals. Meanwhile each place cultivated its peculiar past as a source of institutional distinction. Oberlin succeeded in this as well as any of its competitors. How a college transcends its own past to achieve national academic superiority is one of the toughest questions a historian can try to answer. In Oberlin's case, I think its 19th-century past of Christian moral reformism actually made possible its later academic prowess.
Quality requires money.
Oberlin coaxed the money from a generation of pious rich men, many of whom became millionaires in the gaudy post-Civil War Gilded Age. In almost every case, their life goals were forged in active church-going homes where they grew up, and while they set about making their money, they never lost their youthful admiration for Oberlin's perfectionist antebellum commitments to antislavery, women's rights, and temperance. The admiration paid off. I think I can capture that transition with a single example. The Social Gospel dominated Christian reformism early in this century.