- American higher education is nearly four centuries old. But in the decades after World War II, as government and social support surged and enrollments exploded, the role of colleges and universities in American society changed dramatically. The author provides a history of this remarkable transformation, taking readers from the GI Bill and the postwar expansion of higher education to the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, desegregation and coeducation, and the challenges confronting American colleges today. Shedding light on the tensions and triumphs of an era of rapid change, the author shows how American universities emerged after the war as the world's most successful system for the advancement of knowledge, how the pioneering of mass higher education led to the goal of higher education for all, and how the "selectivity sweepstakes" for admission to the most elite schools has resulted in increased stratification today. The text identifies 1980 as a turning point when the link between research and economic development stimulated a revival in academic research - and the ascendancy of the modern research university - that continues into the twenty-first century. Sweeping in scope and richly insightful, this book demonstrates how growth has been the defining feature of modern higher education, but how each generation since the war has pursued it for different reasons