Since World War II, American higher education has been transformed by the postwar baby boom, the GI Bill, federally funded research partly inspired by the Cold War, and the belief that education is the foundation of democracy, prosperity, and national security. The expansion of higher education, particularly public universities and community colleges, opened new opportunities to minorities and the poor. No longer were colleges the ivory towers of the pre-World War II era. During the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s, colleges became sites for political activity, which included teach-ins on and protests against the Vietnam War, civil rights activism, and protests to remove ROTC from the curriculum and to stop the military from recruiting on campus. More subtly, since the end of the Cold War higher education has been part of America's ascendancy as the world's only superpower. Exchange programs and international students have provided the engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs who fueled the Military-Industrial Complex and consumer economy.
In the second half of the twentieth century, American higher education, which was already the largest higher education system in the world, became the superpower of global higher education. The number of students grew from under 2 million in 1946 to over 15 million by the end of the twentieth century, and institutions of higher education became a gateway to upward mobility for World War II veterans, postwar baby boomers, and millions of others. By 1996, an individual without any college education was earning an average of $16,000 and an individual with a BA degree was earning an average of $40,000.
The Serviceman's Readjustment Act (1944), popularly known as the GI Bill of Rights, became to educational democratizers what land grant colleges had been in the nineteenth century. The GI Bill provided nearly 15 million Americans who had served in the armed forces with higher education benefits that increased with length of service and duty in combat zones. By 1950, more than five times as many students were graduating as had in 1940. The introduction of a peacetime draft in 1948 and U.S. participation in the Korean and Vietnam Wars under that draft assured that millions more U.S. servicemen would be eligible for GI Bill benefits.
The Cold War also directly influenced higher education. First, the Cold War led Congress to establish the National Science Foundation in 1950 and through it and other agencies to fund peer-reviewed, university-based research. By the 1990s, federal grants for university research were in excess of $20 billion annually.
Although Cold War-influenced public investment strengthened both universities generally and their science components particularly, it also had negative consequences. Just as Cold War military contracts went over-whelmingly to a small number of large corporations, 95 percent of federal funds went to the top one hundred research universities, producing an unbalanced system. Increases in federal research spending after 1980 for medical and defense projects further increased the gap between the elite institutions and the remainder.
The 1960s, a decade of great social ferment over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War and of mass movements demanding much higher levels of individual freedom and social equality, also had a great and contradictory influence on higher education. The Civil Rights movement, which attracted large numbers of youth, helped to revive liberal and radical thinking and encouraged the highest level of popular political activism in modern U.S. history. In higher education, this activism took the form of campaigns to integrate minorities, eliminate restrictive codes of conduct that treated students as juvenile wards, and open higher education to a wide variety of new and often interdisciplinary liberal arts curricula and professional and vocational education representative of and directly relevant to contemporary society and social issues.
In the 1960s, partly as a result of the baby boom following World War II, the number of students in higher education programs more than doubled. The fastest growth came in a new sector, community colleges, which had open admission policies and supported the white-collar vocational aspirations of working-class youth. Five hundred new colleges opened and enrollments quintupled. New four-year colleges also opened, existing colleges greatly expanded admissions, and states sought to create administrative agencies to plan for public higher education. The nation's two premier free public higher education systems, the University of California and the City University of New York represented the best of these developments, creating new four-year and two-year colleges that appeared to implement the liberal ideal that higher education was both a public service and a right available to all qualified citizens rather than a commodity to be purchased by those who were able to pay.
The Higher Education Act of 1965 and the establishment of a Department of Education as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program seemed to provide federal support and organizational structures for this liberal public service model for higher education, although critics warned that funding such expansion through a generous student loan program rather than institutionalizing free tuition on the California and New York models would make the system hostage to fluctuations in the national economy.
