America's founding fathers seemed to agree: one of the best means to secure a virtuous new republic would be through the education of the upcoming generation. Even as faction gave way to party divisions, few disputed the importance of educational institutions. America's most promising youth would complete their training in citizenship and preparation for governmental leadership in college. The optimism of this vision for American schooling was perhaps best displayed in the prize-winning essay of University of Pennsylvania graduate and Jeffersonian newspaper editor Samuel Harrison Smith. In his anonymous 1797 essay for the American Philosophical Society, Smith identified the benefits of education for both the individual and society. The citizen would learn to protect liberty for himself and others: “(He) will be a free man in its truest sense. He will know his rights, and he will understand the rights of others.” If Americans could collectively concentrate on the science of government, they might achieve its perfection: “No circumstance could so rapidly promote the growth of this science as a universal illumination of mind. The minds of millions centering in one point could not fail to produce the sublimest discoveries.” In its perfected state, America would truly serve as a city upon the hill: “She would soon become a model for the nations of the earth.”

Historical study of the age-grade efficiency movement which took firm root in North America and the Antipodes during the early 1900s, in particular the preoccupation of education authorities with “the retardation problem” (the number of scholars over-aged for grade in consequence of their failure to make “normal” annual progress through the course of instruction), importantly contributes to understanding the age-grade homogeneity of modern elementary schools. The following account of mid-twentieth century developments in South Australia seeks to provide comparative insights into measures adopted to reduce retardation in the interests of preserving school order, enhancing pedagogical and bureaucratic “efficiency,” improving access to secondary courses, and alleviating the costs of “laggards” to the state.

Many of us who teach the history of American higher education likely experience an uncomfortable moment at the beginning of each collegiate term when we order for our classes a book first published in 1962: Frederick Rudolph's classic The American College and University: A History. Of course, we are somewhat heartened by choosing the 1990 republished version with its fine new introduction by John Thelin, as well as by requiring Lester Goodchild and Harold Wechsler's recently revised compendium of articles, The History of Higher Education. Nonetheless, choosing a textbook as old as Rudolph's for a basic overview of the field feels awkward to historians who are witnessing a surge of work in the history of American higher education.

In 1991 historian F. Michael Perko offered a literature review, “Religious Higher Education in America: An Historiographic Survey,” that provided a solid analysis of the state of historical work on religion and higher education, as well a discussion of issues facing historians wishing to apply that lens to collegiate history. Perko was discouraged as he reviewed the field, noting “the present bleak state of the enterprise,” where many authors “failed consistently to situate their subjects within broad frames of reference, and have ignored, for the most part, the interpretive dimensions that give historical study purpose and life.” During the 1990s, however, there has been a minor explosion in solid, creative work on various historical aspects of religion and higher education that begins to provide interpretive depth and scope. This essay extends Perko's review by discussing recent developments in certain aspects of the history of religion and American higher education.

This essay represents an effort within this larger historiographical conversation to examine how historians of higher education have addressed institutions, specifically, the public community college. With an institutional lens providing the focus, it examines current efforts in the field and speculates on directions scholarship appears to be taking. Even with an array of institutions before them, from research universities and comprehensive colleges to two-year schools and specialized institutions, historians of higher education have tended to use the research university as the means for understanding United States higher education in its institutional form. This essay asks, should we pare down historical analysis of higher education to one institutional type? What have we lost by focusing so narrowly on that level? Further, can we learn the nature of United States higher education in its institutional form by also considering the community college?

In 1947, the President's Commission on Higher Education issued the so-called “Truman Report” which identified five significant deterrents to completing a college degree: race, gender, religion, geography, and socioeconomic background. Over fifty years later, religious affiliation, geographic origins, and gender are no longer significant barriers to degree attainment. In fact, by 1991 women comprised a majority of America's undergraduates. At the time of the Truman Report, “race” referred generally to African Americans. Although no one would argue that African-American students (as well as other disadvantaged students of color) are attending, persisting, and graduating from colleges in the numbers deemed desirable, these students are better represented now than they were at the conclusion of World War II. In 1940, for example, African Americans with a college degree represented approximately two percent of the black population, while college-educated whites comprised over seven percent of white adults. By 1995 the gap had widened to 26 percent of white adults but only 15 percent of African Americans. The Truman Report considered a family poor if it had a cash income of less than $2,350 per annum—approximately 20 percent of all United States families. It cited research showing that when student ability (as measured by standard IQ tests) was held constant, boys from the higher income group were four times more likely to attend college than boys from the lowest stratum. By the early 1990s, students from the highest income quartile were ten times more likely to earn a college degree than those from the lowest quartile. Therefore, the only group identified by the Truman Report whose odds of attending college are actually worse today is the poor, regardless of racial background. When the persistent and pernicious interrelationship of poverty and minority status within the United States is acknowledged, socioeconomic background emerges as perhaps the most salient determinate of college attendance.