Lowell State College

Lowell State College was a public college in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was established in 1959 and is the precursor to the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The founding of this new state school was the culmination of decades of institutional growth that began in 1894 with the establishment of Lowell Normal School (a two-year training college for teachers), continued through the transition to the four-year Lowell Teachers College in 1932, and concluded in 1959 with the founding of Lowell State College. From 1959 to 1975, Lowell State College served the region's need for comprehensive public higher education.^[1]: 89 It was not superseded in this role until the merging of Lowell State College and Lowell Technological Institute into one new organization—University of Lowell and then the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1991.^[1]: 104 The Lowell State College campus continues to serve as the core of what is now known as the University of Massachusetts Lowell's South Campus. The final enrollment at Lowell State College was 2,353 students with 1,877 of them undergraduates and 476 of them being postgraduates. ^[2]

Lowell State College and its predecessor organizations—Lowell Normal School and Lowell Teachers College—together served as important economic, political, and cultural drivers to the region through the development of teachers to serve in schools in the region and the opportunities offered for further education in diverse fields as the school expanded. Located in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the country's early sites of industrial manufacturing, the city was the home of diverse and rapid immigration as new waves of new people sought jobs in the mills.^[1]: 29 Spanning the period from 1894 to 1960, Lowell State College (and its earlier iterations) were one of the major institutions in this regional city in northeastern Massachusetts.