Creating the Golden Age: Federal Policy Making and the Emergence of U.S. Higher Education as a Solution to Sociopolitical Problems

• In Event: The Administrative State of Education in the 20th Century

Abstract

Relying on new archival research and document analysis, this paper seeks to reframe the "Golden Age" of US higher education as the product of a proactive policy agenda, rather than a reactive set of inevitabilities. Through the lens of federal policymaking between 1944 and 1965, the paper shows how human actors in positions of power portrayed higher education, and college-going in particular, as a solution to the sociodemographic and geopolitical crises at hand. These crises were real but college-going was not the foregone solution to the problems. Its path to solution status was due to rhetorical strategies and agenda-setting by partisans who wanted to see American higher education grow into an essential part of the nation’s public purposes.

Author

• Ethan W. Ris, University of Nevada - Reno
  Presenting Author