State College's History Goes Back To 1855

Not long after Altoona was formed, there was a school formed in the valley of Pennsylvania just up north a bit, designed to educate farmers and aspiring farmers and how to improve their own existing farms. Initially it was called the Farmer's High School until it became more than a secondary school and turned into a college of higher education, being named the Farmer's College of Pennsylvania. In time this small agricultural school grew into a massive university that eventually eclipsed the historic University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in name recognition. This school is now known as the Pennsylvania State University, better known as Penn State.

Naturally, the college formed first, but eventually they wanted to build a city around the growing university, so that the students and faculty had a local place to live, work, buy food, and do recreational activities. This town slowly grew into its own borough aptly named State College. The town's name never changed when Penn State became a university although the city limits of the school became also known as University Park, and this the entire borough is State College/University Park, and despite the two names, it is a single municipality. Being one of the largest boroughs in the state, larger than many cities, it is said to be third biggest community in the state on gameday because of Beaver Stadium, the football stadium that the Penn State football team plays their games in, holds over 107,000 people. The sports teams for Penn State are called the Nittany Lions, a team name derrived from the mountain lions that once roamed around Mount Nittany.

State College is listed as one of the better central Pennsylvania communities to live in among many lists of that type while Penn State is always in the top 50 list of Universities in the country, with both the University Park campus and the branch campuses being considered "Public Ivies", which is meant to imply that they are a public university with the educational quality of an Ivy League school but without the price tag. Ivy League does not simply mean a quality school, however, seeing as how Stanford, MIT, and NYU are not Ivies (contrary to popular belief), it was formed in 1954 as an athletic conference that include eight old Northeastern schools, which are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania. The last one is often confused with Penn State, leading some to associate it with the Ivy League. However, that is not to say that one's education at Penn State is inferior, by contrast, given that most Ivy League four year degrees involve classes taught by graduate students, a situation less common at Penn State (although it exists), you often receive a four year education just as good as you'd get from one of the Ancient Eight and a graduate degree that's almost as good.