The traditional European university is now extinct. The conditions in higher education that have succeeded it are highly unstable and therefore transitory, and its eventual replacement is now dimly perceptible on the horizon. The European university is of course an abstraction, meant to approximate the attributes of higher education in Germany, France, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries. The system in each of these countries is largely controlled by public authorities, and in every crucial area the future of the universities depends on actions that will or will not be taken by the state. In the not too distant past they were professors' universities with respect to their internal affairs, and elite in their relationship to society. All of them have passed through fundamentally similar transformations since World War II, and now the questions of access to higher education (recruitment and selection) are vital to the universities' individual and collective futures. (Author/MSE)