From Mass Higher Education to Universal Access: The American Advantage

This paper reflects on some of the main issues facing research universities as they strive to simultaneously complete the creation of systems of mass higher education and also move towards Internet-based universal access. It examines these issues from an American perspective, but in comparative context. Universities on both sides of the Atlantic face problems, but they take different (though similar) forms and evoke different responses. They are part of a larger crisis in higher education in Western societies. That these problems flow from the partial success in creating and adapting systems of mass higher education over the past half-century make them no less threatening to the institutions which achieved that success.