The purported "Golden Age" of American higher education, typically associated with the two decades following World War II, was marked by increasingly generous federal support of the nation's postsecondary institutions and their students. Unlike analyses that attribute this largesse to factors like geopolitics (i.e., a response to the…

There was a lot of talk about both the fate of American democracy and American higher education in 2021, but not much consideration about how the two were deeply intertwined. The 1947 report "Higher Education for American Democracy" showed awareness of how race, sex, class, and religious discrimination thwarted the talents and ambitions…

Every six years or so, reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965 provides the opportunity for Congress--and the nation--to examine the current conditions and consider the future needs of higher education. While reauthorization tends to focus on funding and on "fixing" postsecondary education's most visible problems, the…

The three great federal policy initiatives concerning higher education, the land-grant movement of the 1860s, the World War II-era decision to rely on universities for basic and applied research, and the GI Bill of 1944, have affected development of the American system of higher education more than any others. (MSE)