Recent Higher Education Publications
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Roger L. Geiger, “Philosophy in 19th Century American Colleges and Universities,” [forthcoming, 2025].
Roger L. Geiger, “The Brain of Society: Knowledge and American Higher Education Since 1945” in Universities and Higher Education in the United States Since 1945: Annali di Storia dele Universita Italiane, (2/2024), 7-28.
Roger L. Geiger, “Merit Exists, and So Does Inequality,” Academic Questions, 37, 3 (Fall 2024): 81-9.
Philip G. Altbach and Roger Geiger, “Policy Dialogue: Higher Education in the US and Abroad: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” History of Education Quarterly, 64 (2024), 538-49.
Roger L. Geiger, “Becoming a Modern Public Research University: The Postwar Challenges of Penn State and Rutgers, 1945-1965,” Mansion Notes: Newsletter of the Centre County Historical Society, 46, 2 (Spring 2024), 1, 11-14.
Roger L. Geiger, “Universities before their Time: Review of Adam R. Nelson, Capital of Mind,” Higher Education, (9/17/2024).
Roger L. Geiger, “Review of Adam R. Nelson, Exchange of Ideas,” Journal of American History, (forthcoming).
Roger L. Geiger, “The Ten Generations of American Higher Education” [revised] in R. O. Berdahl, P. G. Altbach, and P. J. Gumport, eds. Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century, 5th Edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022, 3-36.
Roger L. Geiger, “Review of Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s,” Quillette, (7 Feb. 2022).
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American Higher Education since World War II: A History
(Princeton University Press, 2019)
Roger L. Geiger
A masterful history of the postwar transformation of American higher education
In the decades after World War II, as government and social support surged and enrollments exploded, the role of colleges and universities in American society changed dramatically. Roger Geiger provides an in-depth history of this remarkable transformation, taking readers from the GI Bill and the postwar expansion of higher education to the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, desegregation and coeducation, and the ascendancy of the modern research university. He demonstrates how growth has been the defining feature of modern higher education, but how each generation since the war has pursued it for different reasons. Sweeping in scope and richly insightful, this groundbreaking book provides the context we need to understand the complex issues facing our colleges and universities today, from rising inequality and skyrocketing costs to deficiencies in student preparedness and lax educational standards.
“A comprehensive historical account. [American Higher Education since World War II] is well written, copiously footnoted and makes for an accessible read.”—David Wheeler, Times Higher Education
“Roger Geiger is the preeminent historian of American higher education and this book shows why. By absorbing the lessons of this authoritative and panoramic volume, we may find the wisdom to build on the accomplishments of the scientific and scholarly disciplines while treating the distempers that threaten higher education’s further progress.”—Steven Brint, author of Two Cheers for Higher Education
Roger L. Geiger is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University. His books include The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (Princeton).