A system without a plan: Emergence of an American system of higher education in the twentieth century

This is a story about the peculiar nature of American higher education and about what made this system so successful. Following the plotline of a Horatio Alger story, this institution moved from rags in the mid nineteenth century to riches in the late twentieth century, from parochialism and academic disrepute to global reach and broad esteem. The question I want to explore is why this happened.

In some ways it may seem strange to call the motley collection of more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States a system at all. System implies a plan and a form of governance that keeps the system working according to this plan, and that indeed is the formal structure of higher education systems in most countries, where a government ministry oversees the system and tinkers with it over time. But the U.S. system of higher education did not arise from a plan, and no agency governs it. It just happened. But it is nonetheless a system, which has a well-defined structure and a clear set of rules that guides the actions of the individuals and institutions within it. In this sense, it is less like a political system guided by a constitution than a solar system guided by the laws of physics. And like the latter, its history is not a deliberate construction but an evolutionary process. The solar system also just happened, but that doesn't keep us from understanding how it came about and how it works. My job in this paper is to explain how the American system of higher education came about. I examine the forces that drove this process of development, the distinctive structure that emerged from the process, the rules that govern the structure, and the particular benefits and cost that the structure bestowed upon this peculiarly American system.