Chronicling Higher Education

"The recent history of elite higher education is usually told as a glorious story of democratization. But future historians may look back and see something different: a restrictive age of old money (1900–1950), followed by an interregnum of broadened access (from the 1950s into the 1980s) and then a period (circa 1990–?) in which new money poured in...."

Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University gives an overview of the evolution of American higher education in this article (the first of two parts) in The New York Review of Books.