3.2 Data Analysis

When piding American higher education into different historical stages, I have consulted a number of books about the history of American higher education. The ways of classifying American higher educational history are mainly identical. Finally, I choose the standard of classification in the book History of Foreign Higher Education. Eventually these universities are pided into 4 historical stages: universities in the colonial period, universities in the period from Independent War to the Civil War, universities in the period from the Civil War to World War II, universities after World War II.

By making tables and conducting diachronic study, I aim to analyze the datum in 5 tables. Analysis will focus on two points: word frequency of certain words and percentages of these words in university mottoes. According to the two crucial aspects, the body of the paper begins to introduce general trend of American university mottoes and characteristics of university mottoes in different stages.