Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees (the other being Harvard Extension School). Founded in 1636, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world.

In 1636 the New College came into existence by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—though without a single building, instructor, or student. In 1639 it was renamed in honor of deceased Charlestown minister John Harvard, who had bequeathed to the school his entire library and half of his monetary estate.

Harvard's first instructor, schoolmaster Nathaniel Eaton, was also its first instructor to be dismissed—in 1639 for overstrict discipline. The school's first students were graduated in 1642. In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, "from the Wampanoag ... did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period."

At the time of Harvard's founding (as today) the colleges of England's Oxford and Cambridge were communities within the larger university, each an association of scholars (both established and aspiring) sharing room and board; Harvard's founders may have envisioned it as the first in a series of sibling colleges which, on the English model, would eventually constitute a university. Though no further "colleges" materialized, nonetheless as Harvard began granting higher degrees in the late eighteenth century it was increasingly styled Harvard University--even as Harvard College (in keeping with emerging American usage of that word) was increasingly thought of as the university's undergraduate division in particular.