 He attended rural schools and determined early that his destiny was to reform education of the masses.He briefly attended Alfred University (1870),
then Amherst College, where he belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, and from which he earned a bachelor's degree in 1874 and a master's in 1877.While still a student, he founded the Library Bureau, which sold high-quality index-cards and filing-cabinets, and established the standard dimensions for catalog cards.