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A History of American Higher Education. By John R. Thelin. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xxiv, 421 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8018-7855-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8018-8004-1.)
American colleges and universities may no longer cater, as they did through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the higher education of an Arnoldian saving remnant, but neither has the democratization of access in our own time had the larger saving effect predicted for it. Democratization has led in most cases only to greater fragmentation-a growing proliferation of choices for a higher education that in its new "postsecondary" phase and in its slavish adherence to the bottom line turns out to be not that much higher at all (p. 260). This, or something like it, is one of the many startling conclusions to emerge from John R. Thelin's fresh and important new history of higher education in America. Unfortunately, as Thelin consistently shows,...