[jacques_chester]

The theology schools were there first, but understandably they didn't teach much outside of ... theology. Kids with rich parents could do the Grand Tour of the continent and often visited famous thinkers where they lived. Around these sites universities often followed; eventually the idea of the university as an institution rather than happenstance evolved later.

(edit: I'm absolutely hand-waving a lot here, so I am prepared to be corrected)

[_delirium]

I'm familiar with the Grand Tour, but your chronology seems backwards; the Grand Tour was a 17th-century creation, while the humanist university coalesced by the 15th/16th.

It wasn't limited to theology, though that was some of the original impetus; even the 13th-century universities commonly taught law, philosophy, and medicine. Through the 14th/15th/16th centuries most of the rest of the subjects were added: mathematics, astronomy, literature, etc. Galileo, for example, held a university chair in mathematics a century before the wealthy started sending their kids on the Grand Tour.

Indeed from everything I've read, university students were seen as stereotypically poor up until around the 18th century, living either at the university in vaguely monastery-type conditions with common dining and small quarters, or attempting to rent cheap rooms from townspeople, sometimes leading to tensions as locals felt the influx of poor students was ghettoizing the area (the area around the University of Paris was slightly notorious for centuries).

[jacques_chester]

My understanding is that while students were poor in a sense -- little to no income - they tended to come from wealthy families. Otherwise they simply had to get work or starve to death, which precluded almost everyone from study.

The tradition of the poor rich kid has endured to this day.

Thanks for correcting me on the Grand Tour.