Degrees of Control : A Sociology of Educational Expantitle: sion and Occupational Credentialism

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Brown, David K. Teachers College Press 0807734527 9780807734520 9780585349305 English Degrees, Academic--Social aspects--United States, Education, Higher--Social aspects--United States, College graduates--United States. 1995 LB2390.B76 1995eb 378.2/4/0973 Degrees, Academic--Social aspects--United States, Education, Higher--Social aspects--United States, College graduates--United States.

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Degrees of Control
A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism
David K. Brown Foreword by David F. Labaree

Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amster New York, NY 10027 Copyright 1995 by Teachers College, Columbia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic including photocopy, or any information storage an tem, without permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Da

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Brown, David K., 1955Degrees of control : a sociology of educational exp occupational credentialism / David K. Brown ; foreword by David F. Labaree. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8077-3452-7 (alk. paper) 1. Degrees, AcademicSocial aspectsUnited States. 2. Education, HigherSocial aspectsUnited States. 3 graduatesUnited States. I. Title. LB2390.B76 1995 378.2'4'0973dc20 ISBN 0-8077-3452-7 (cloth) Printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For My Mother and Father

Contents
Foreword by David F. Labaree Preface 1. Introduction The Basic Argument and Historical Narrative

Historical Demographics of Higher Educational

Sociological vs. Historical Knowledge: A Meth The Chapters That Follow

2. The Historical Sociology of Credentialism: A Cr

Functionalism, Education, and Occupational Sk

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Too Much Economic Rationality in the Wrong

The Ruling Class, Higher Education, and Occup

Randall Collins' The Credential Society: Was M

Margaret Archer's Sociology of Educational Ex Conclusion 3. A Theory of Educational Credentialism Formation of an Institutional Base An Agency for the Production of Agents

A Specification of the Concept of Formally Tau

Technically Based Labor Market Recruitment U

Control-Based Labor Market Recruitment Unce Conclusion

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4. Political, Cultural, and Economic Origins of Exte

The Absence of Centralized State or Church Co

Competition and Cultural Tradition in U.S. Hig

A Critical Economic Inducement to College Fo Lands

Case Studies of Land-Speculative College Foun

Conclusion: Patterns of Institutional Proliferatio

5. The Formation of a College-Dominated Educatio

A Pivotal Juncture: Enrollments and Reforms in

Educational Administrators Articulate a Stratifi System, 18901930 Conclusion

6. Labor Market Transformations and College Acco

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Labor Market Transformations and Collegiate C

Formal Education and the Administration of La

Growth of Private Sector Managerial Credentia Peculiarities of the U.S. Higher Civil Service

Conclusion: The Abstraction of Graduates' Stat

7. Conclusion: Conceptualizing Twentieth-Century The Multivalent Culture of Credentialism

Tiered Educational Competition and Rationaliz States, Welfare Politics, and Credentialism Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

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Foreword

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In this book, David Brown tackles an important question that has long puzzled scholars who wanted to understand the central role that education plays in American society: When compared with other Western countries, why did the United States experience such extraordinary growth in higher education? Whereas in most societies higher education has long been seen as a privilege that is granted to a relatively small proportion of the population, in the United States it has increasingly come to be seen as a right of the ordinary citizen. Nor was this rapid increase in accessibility a very recent phenomenon. As Brown notes, between 1870 and 1930 the proportion of college-age persons (18 to 21 years old) who attended institutions of higher education rose from 1.7% to 13.0%. And this was long before the proliferation of regional state universities and community colleges made college attendance a majority experience for American youth.

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The range of possible answers to this question is considerable, with each carrying its own distinctive image of the nature of American political and social life. For example, perhaps the rapid growth in the opportunity for higher education was an expression of egalitarian politics and a confirmation of the American Dream; or perhaps it was a political diversion, providing ideological cover for persistent inequality; or perhaps it was merely an accidentan unintended consequence of a struggle for something altogether different. In politically charged terrain such as this, one would pre-fer to seek guidance from an author who doesn't ask the reader to march behind an ideological banner toward a preordained conclusion, but who instead rigorously examines the historical data and allows for the possibility of encountering surprises. What the reader wants, I think, is an analysis that is both informed by theory and sensitive to historical nuance.

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In this book, Brown provides such an analysis. He approaches the subject from the perspective of historical sociology, and in doing so he manages to maintain an unusually effective balance between historical explanation and sociological theory-building. Unlike many sociologists dealing with history, he never oversimplifies the complexity of histori-

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cal events in the rush toward premature theoretical closure; and unlike many historians dealing with sociology, he doesn't merely import existing theories into his historical analysis but rather conceives of the analysis itself as a contribution to theory. His aim is therefore quite ambitiousto spell out a theoretical explanation for the spectacular growth and peculiar structure of American higher education, and to ground this explanation in an analysis of the role of college credentials in American life.

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Traditional explanations do not hold up very well when examined closely. Structural-functionalist theory argues that an expanding economy created a powerful demand for advanced technical skills (human capital), which only a rapid expansion of higher education could fill. But Brown notes that during this expansion most students pursued programs not in vocational-technical areas but in liberal arts, meaning that the forms of knowledge they were acquiring were rather remote from the economically productive skills supposedly demanded by employers. Social reproduction theory sees the university as a mechanism that emerged to protect the privilege of the upper-middle class behind a wall of cultural capital, during a time (with the decline of proprietorship) when it became increasingly difficult for economic capital alone to provide such protection. But, while this theory points to a central outcome of college expansion, it fails to explain the historical

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contingencies and agencies that actually produced this outcome. In fact, both of these theories are essentially functionalist in approach, portraying higher education as arising automatically to fill a social needwithin the economy, in the first case, and within the class system, in the second.

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However, credentialing theory, as developed most extensively by Randall Collins (1979), helps explain the socially reproductive effect of expanding higher education without denying agency. It conceives of higher education diplomas as a kind of cultural currency that becomes attractive to status groups seeking an advantage in the competition for social positions, and therefore it sees the expansion of higher education as a response to consumer demand rather than functional necessity. Upper classes tend to benefit disproportionately from this educational development, not because of an institutional correspondence principle that preordains such an outcome, but because they are socially and culturally better equipped to gain access to and succeed within the educational market.

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This credentialist theory of educational growth is the one that Brown finds most compelling as the basis for his own interpretation. However, when he plunges into a close examination of American higher education, he finds that Collins' formulation of this theory often does not coincide very well with the historical evidence. One key problem is that Collins

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does not examine the nature of labor market recruitment, which is critical for credentialist theory, since the pursuit of college credentials only makes sense if employers are rewarding degree holders with desirable jobs. Brown shows that between 1800 and 1880 the number of colleges in the United States grew dramatically (as Collins also asserts), but that enrollments at individual colleges were quite modest. He argues that this binge of institution-creation was driven by a combination of religious and market forces but not (contrary to Collins) by the pursuit of credentials. There simply is no good evidence that a college degree was much in demand by employers during this period. Instead, a great deal of the growth in the number of colleges was the result of the desire by religious and ethnic groups to create their own settings for producing clergy and transmitting culture. In a particularly intriguing analysis, Brown argues that an additional spur to this growth came from markedly

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less elevated sourceslocal boosterism and land speculationas development-oriented towns sought to establish colleges as a mechanism for attracting land buyers and new residents.

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Brown's version of credentialing theory identifies a few central factors that are required in order to facilitate a credential-driven expansion of higher education, and by 1880 several of these were already in place. One such factor is substantial wealth. Higher education is expensive, and expanding it for reasons of individual status attainment rather than for societal necessity is a wasteful use of a nation's resources; it is only feasible for a very wealthy country. The United States was such a country in the late nineteenth century. A second factor is a broad institutional base. At this point, the United States had the largest number of colleges per million residents that the country has even seen, before or since. When combined with the small enrollments at each college, this meant that there was a great potential for growth within an already existing institutional framework. This potential was reinforced by a third factor, decentralized control. Colleges were governed by local boards rather

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than central state authorities, thus encouraging entrepreneurial behavior by college leaders, especially in the intensively competitive market environment they faced. However, three other essential factors for rapid credential-based growth in higher education were still missing in 1880. For one thing, colleges were not going to be able to attract large numbers of new students, who were after all unlikely to be motivated solely by the love of learning, unless they could offer these students both a pleasant social experience and a practical educational experienceneither of which was the norm at colleges for most of the nineteenth century. Another problem was that colleges could not function as credentialing institutions until they had a

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monopoly over a particular form of credentials, but in 1880 they were still competing directly with high schools for the same students. Finally, their credentials were not going to have any value on the market unless employers began to demonstrate a distinct preference for hiring college graduates, and such a preference was still not obvious at this stage.

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According to Brown, the 1880s saw a major shift in all three of these factors. The trigger for this change was a significant oversupply of institutions relative to existing demand. In this life or death situation, colleges desperately sought to increase the pool of potential students. It is no coincidence that this period marked the rapid diffusion of efforts to improve the quality of social life on campuses (from the promotion of athletics to the proliferation of fraternities), and also the shift toward a curriculum with a stronger claim of practicality (emphasizing modern languages and science over Latin and Greek). At the same time, colleges sought to guarantee a flow of students from feeder institutions, which required them to establish a hierarchical relationship with high schools. The end of the century was the period in which colleges began requiring completion of a high school course as a prerequisite for college admission instead of the traditional entrance examination.

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This system provided high schools with a stable outlet for its graduates and colleges with a predictable flow of reasonably well-prepared students. However, none of this would have been possible if the college degree had not acquired a significant exchange value in the labor market. Without this, there would have been only social reasons for attending college, and high schools would have had little incentive to submit to college mandates.

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Perhaps Brown's strongest contribution to credential theory is his subtle and persuasive analysis of the reasoning that led employers to assert a preference for college graduates in the hiring process. Until now, this issue has posed a significant, perhaps fatal, problem for credentialing theory, which has asked the reader to accept two apparently contradictory assertions about credentials. First, the theory claims that a college degree has exchange value but not necessarily use value; that is, it is attractive to the consumer because it can be cashed in on a good job more or less independently of any learning that was acquired along the way. Second, this exchange value depends on the willingness of employers to hire applicants based on credentials alone, without direct knowledge of what these applicants know or what they can do. However this raises a serious question about the rationality of the employer in this process. After all, why would an employer, who presumably

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cares about the productivity of future employees, hire people based solely on a college's certification of competence in the absence of any evidence for that competence?

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Brown tackles this issue with a nice measure of historical and sociological insight. He notes that the late nineteenth century saw the growing rationalization of work, which led to the development of large-scale bureaucracies to administer this work within both private corporations and public agencies. One result was the creation of a rapidly growing occupational sector for managerial employees who could function effectively within such a rationalized organizational structure. College graduates seemed to fit the bill for this kind of work. They emerged from the top level of the newly developed hierarchy of educational institutions and therefore seemed like natural candidates for management work in the upper levels of the new administrative hierarchy, which was based not on proprietorship or political office but on apparent skill. And what kinds of skills were called for in this line of work? What the new managerial employees needed was not so much the technical skills

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posited by human capital theory, he argues, but a general capacity to work effectively in a verbally and cognitively structured organizational environment, and also a capacity to feel comfortable about assuming positions of authority over other people.

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These were things that the emerging American college could and indeed did provide. The increasingly corporate social structure of student life on college campuses provided good socialization for bureaucratic work, and the process of gaining access to and graduation from college provided students with an institutionalized confirmation of their social superiority and qualifications for leadership. Note that these capacities were substantive consequences of having attended college, but they were not learned as part of the college's formal curriculum. That is, the characteristics that qualified college graduates for future bureaucratic employment were a side effect of their pursuit of a college education. In this sense, then, the college credential had a substantive meaning for employers that justified them in using it as a criterion for employmentless for the human capital that college provided than for the social capital that college conferred on graduates. Therefore, this credential, Brown

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argues, served an important role in the labor market by reducing the uncertainty that plagued the process of bureaucratic hiring. After all, how else was an employer to gain some assurance that a candidate could do this kind of work? A college degree offered a claim to competence, which had enough substance behind it to be credible even if this substance was largely unrelated to the content of the college curriculum. By the 1890s all the pieces were in place for a rapid expansion of college enrollments, strongly driven by credentialist pressures. Employers had reason to give preference to college graduates when hiring for

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management positions. As a result, middle-class families had an increasing incentive to provide their children with privileged access to an advantaged social position by sending them to college. For the students themselves, this extrinsic reward for attending college was reinforced by the intrinsic benefits accruing from an attractive social life on campus. All of this created a very strong demand for expanding college enrollments, and the pre-existing institutional conditions in higher education made it possible for colleges to respond to this demand in an aggressive fashion. There were a thousand independent institutions of higher education, accustomed to playing entrepreneurial roles in a competitive educational market, that were eager to capitalize on the surge of interest in attending college and to adapt themselves to the preferences of these new tuition-paying consumers. The result was a powerful and unrelenting surge

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of expansion in college enrollments that continued for the next century. Brown provides a persuasive answer to the initial question about why American higher education expanded at such a rapid rate. But at this point the reader may well respond by asking the generic question that one should ask of any analyst, and that is, ''So what?" More specifically, in light of the particular claims of this analysis, the question becomes: "What difference does it make that this expansion was spurred primarily by the pursuit of educational credentials?" In my view, at least, the answer to that question is clear. The impact of credentialism on both American society and the American educational system has been profoundprofoundly negative. Consider some of the problems it has caused.

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One major problem is that credentialism is astonishingly inefficient. Education is the largest single public investment made by most modern societies, and this is justified on the grounds that it provides a critically important contribution to the collective welfare. The public value of education is usually calculated as some combination of two types of benefits, the preparation of capable citizens (the political benefit) and the training of productive workers (the economic benefit). However the credentialist argument advanced by Brown suggests that these public benefits are not necessarily being met and that the primary beneficiaries are in fact private individuals. From this perspective, higher education (and the educational system more generally) exists largely as a mechanism for providing individuals with a cultural commodity that will give them a substantial competitive advantage in the pursuit of social position. In short, education

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becomes little but a vast public subsidy for private ambition.

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The practical effect of this subsidy is the production of a glut of graduates. The difficulty posed by this outcome is not that the population becomes overeducated (since such a state is difficult to imagine) but that it becomes overcredentialed, since people are pursuing diplomas less for the knowledge they are thereby acquiring than for the access that the diplomas themselves will provide. The result is a spiral of credential inflation; for as each level of education in turn gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to keep seeking ever higher levels of credentials in order to move a step ahead of the pack. In such a system nobody wins. Consumers have to spend increasing amounts of time and money to gain additional credentials, since the swelling number of credential holders keeps lowering the value of credentials at any given level. Taxpayers find an increasing share of scarce fiscal resources going to support an educational chase with little public

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benefit. Employers keep raising the entry-level education requirements for particular jobs, but they still find that they have to provide extensive training before employees can carry out their work productively. At all levels, this is an enormously wasteful system, one that rich countries like the United States can increasingly ill afford and that less developed countries, who imitate the U.S. educational model, find positively impoverishing.

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A second major problem is that credentialism undercuts learning. In both college and high school, students are all too well aware that their mission is to do whatever it takes to acquire a diploma, which they can then cash in on what really mattersa good job. This has the effect of reifying the formal markers of academic progressgrades, credits, and degreesand encouraging students to focus their attention on accumulating these badges of merit for the exchange value they offer. But at the same time this means directing attention away from the substance of education, reducing student motivation to learn the knowledge and skills that constitute the core of the educational curriculum. Under such conditions, it is quite rational, even if educationally destructive, for students to seek to acquire their badges of merit at a minimum academic cost, to gain the highest grade with the minimum amount of learning. This perspective is almost perfectly captured by a common

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student question, one that sends chills down the back of the learning-centered teacher but that makes perfect sense for the credential-oriented student: "Is this going to be on the test?" (Sedlak et al., 1986, p. 182). We have credentialism to thank for the aversion to learning that, to a great extent, lies at the heart of our educational system. A third problem posed by credentialism is social and political more than educational. According to credentialing theory, the connection

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between social class and education is neither direct nor automatic, as suggested by social reproduction theory. Instead, the argument goes, market forces mediate between the class position of students and their access to and success within the educational system. That is, there is a general competition for admission to institutions of higher education and for levels of achievement within these institutions. Class advantage is no guarantee of success in this competition, since such factors as individual ability, motivation, and luck all play a part in determining the result. Market forces also mediate between educational attainment (the acquisition of credentials) and social attainment (the acquisition of a social position). Some college degrees are worth more in the credentials market than others, and they provide privileged access to higher level positions independent of the class origins of the credential holder.

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However, in both of these market competitions, one for acquiring the credential and the other for cashing it in, a higher class position provides a significant competitive edge. The economic, cultural, and social capital that come with higher class standing gives the bearer an advantage in getting into college, in doing well at college, and in translating college credentials into desirable social outcomes. The marketbased competition that characterizes the acquisition and disposition of educational credentials gives the process a meritocratic set of possibilities, but the influence of class on this competition gives it a socially reproductive set of probabilities as well. The danger is that, as a result, a credential-driven system of education can provide meritocratic cover for socially reproductive outcomes. In the single-minded pursuit of educational credentials, both student consumers and the society that supports them can lose sight of an all-too-

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predictable pattern of outcomes that is masked by the headlong rush for the academic gold. DAVID F. LABAREE MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

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Preface

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Peculiar historical forces have made many U.S. occupations accessible only to persons who hold college degrees. This circumstance is termed "credentialism." In order to comprehend the origins and subsequent character of credentialism, one also must understand the sequence of events that propelled expansion of college enrollments. Credentialism was produced by several factors, including educators' conscious (and sometimes unwitting) expansion of higher education, changes in labor market recruitment patterns, and other circumstances with less direct bearing on job training, such as land speculation interests tied to college-founding and the initial absence of government regulation of education. These forces combined to produce what some observers regard as a credentialing behemoth that dictates the life chances of large segments of the American population.

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As an illustration of the current preponderance of credentialism, consider a recent experience I had while visiting a longtime friend. This person has been a plumber for over 20 years; two generations of family plumbing enterprise preceded his entry to the trade. In becoming a plumber, he first learned informally through childhood work at the family shop, then he completed a statemandated, on-the-job apprenticeship and licensure test. Apprenticeships and licensing exams are standard fare in the plumbing profession, but college education is not required. Now, as it happens, my plumber friend has a contagious sense of humor and a strong concern for children, traits that made him sometimes comment about how he might become a clown. I never took this inclination very seriously, but in a surprising turn in our conversation, I learned he planned to pursue clown training. In fact, the intensive summer clown training institute in which he had enrolled was being held at a

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branch of the university that employed me. He successfully completed the program, earning a certificate of competence as a clown; I now understand he has an invitation to attend the prestigious Ringling Brothers clown school in Florida. However pleased I am personally that my friend is realizing his

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aspiration, the above example suggests exactly where matters standplumbing remains an occupation secured through apprenticeship and state examination, whereas clowning has become an object of formal educational training. Bizarre as these examples may appear to some readers, I am not being facetious or attempting to exaggerate the scope of the credentialing process. Another acquaintance related to me a similar story concerning his formal education as an auctioneer. It may be surprising to some to learn that formal business training in the nineteenth century began in much the same manner as clowning or auctioneering (perhaps even less auspiciously)in short-term courses of study in small, storefront business "colleges" that were entirely separate from the predominant liberal arts colleges of the era. Why formal collegiate occupational training exists for some jobs, while other work lacks college-based training, and what relationship, if any, this phenomenon has

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to the historical expansion of college enrollments are among the questions that are the focus of the analysis that follows. I originally encountered the educationally credentialed world as a relative outsider. Still, I knew something about the increasingly inclusive character of U.S. higher education because, within my working-class family history, only members of my generation ever had attended college, let alone become college professors. The legitimacy college degrees held, outside colleges and credentialed workplaces, was familiar to me from the simultaneous frustration and adulation numerous friends, young and old, exhibited toward these organizations and their members. Therefore, my first expression of gratitude goes to friends and family outside the scholarly community, college graduates and otherwise, who helped me in ways too numerous and varied fully to acknowledge here.

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As I reflect on the intellectual lineage that made this book possible (in some cases, despite unusual obstinacy on my part), a large number of talented teachers, colleagues, and commentators come to mind who have assisted me in various ways. Here I will name only a few people among those on the large list of individuals who surely deserve acknowledgement. I am indebted to Thomas Burger, Alfred Chandler, Randall Collins, Mary Douglas, Paul Gates, Kim Goudreau, Albert Hunter, David Labaree, David Little, Gary McClelland, Christopher Prendergast, Charles Ragin, Richard Stivers, and my colleagues at the University of WisconsinEau Claire for the various words of encouragement, substantive comments, and indelible insights that enabled me to complete this study. Arthur Stinchcombe deserves special thanks for his thoughtful criticisms and suggestions.

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Brian Ellerbeck and Peter Sieger at Teachers College Press supplied invaluable advice about the final organization of the text. Cindy Mudrak

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provided expert technical assistance in the preparation of the final manuscript. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife Diane for immeasurable intellectual, material, and emotional support during the writing of this book. The parties cited above should be exonerated for any shortcomings in what follows; they may or may not approve of the general character of the work, or support the specific claims that I make in the course of my argument. Any errors of fact, omission, logic, and so forth are fully my responsibility.

Page xx The main feature which strikes us when we confront the American university system is its great qualitative and quantitative differentiation. . . . The constitution of American universities and much else about them is affected by the fact that the American universities, to an even greater degree than the German, are institutions which compete with each other. The fact that in the city of Chicago there are two universities and, in the state of Illinois, a third, namely the state university, shows how things stand; what is more this competition is in principle completely free. The American universities compete in a quite relentless way against their sister institutions. Max Weber, untitled address at Dresden, 1911

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The elaboration of diplomas from universities, business and engineering colleges, and the universal clamor for the creation of further educational certificates in all fields serve the formation of a privileged stratum in bureaus and in offices. . . . If we hear from all sides demands for the introduction of regulated curricula culminating in specialized examinations, the reason behind this is, of course, not a suddenly awakened "thirst for education," but rather the desire to limit the supply of candidates for these positions and to monopolize them for the holders of educational patents. Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922)

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1 Introduction
It is commonplace in academic circles to hear that Americans have a near "religious" belief in their educational system. The transference of the economic and political significance of religious culture to educational culture is one of the central outcomes of the "Great Transformation" of American culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Whether one admires or despises higher education in the United States, the fact remains that the life chances of Americans are shaped by the educational system of the country. This point is reflected by the fact that disadvantaged Americans seek out educational advancement as a panacea for political and economic impoverishment and by the fact that privileged citizens seek to send their children to schools at least one step above the ones to which aspiring, poorer people send their children. The net result of this culture of educational aspiration has been expansion of the educational system, particularly in postsecondary education, and ever-increasing inclusion of otherwise power-bereft groups in stratified sectors of education. Although demands for increased access to higher education are wellknown by all even vaguely familiar with U.S. education, the peculiar origins and early development of U.S. higher educational expansion

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generally have not been adequately understood by the public or by intellectuals. By 1930, the 1,157,000 U.S. students enrolled in 1,686 higher educational institutions constituted 13% of Americans aged 18 to 21. This enrollment percentage was much higher than any European nation had reached by the same date. U.S. higher educational expansion continued throughout the twentieth century such that, by 1990, the number of students enrolled in varied forms of postsecondary education made up 56% of Americans aged 18 to 24 (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1990:3). 1

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Also by 1930, undergraduate degrees had become formal or informal prerequisites for entry to graduate training in the traditional professions of ministry, law, medicine, and pharmacy. Dentistry, veterinary science, psychiatry, and other newer professions had begun modeling the successes of university-based medical education. Many newer,

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aspiring professional groups such as journalists, accountants, social workers, and engineers had established similar requirements for entry to their practices. Teachers and educational administrators had solidified undergraduate and/or graduate degree barriers for entry to their professions, especially at more elite high schools and collegiate institutions. Other important areas in which college graduates had made clear inroads were in managerial work in large businesses, in various "cultural" organizations, in public utilities and transportation administration, in the U.S. higher civil service, in agricultural administration, and in government-funded engineering.

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The nexus of expansive higher education and formal educational credentialing of widespread occupations was well established by 1930, though the relationship would become even more rigid as the century passed. Subsequent events, most notably the influences of the state on research, student financial aid, and overall funding of schools during and after World War II, were not foreseeable in 1930, but these forces only accelerated earlier trajectories of expansion and occupational linkage. Unique in its pervasiveness, occupational stratification by educational credentials was evident as a long-term trend in American society by the early twentieth century.

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The purpose of this analysis is to show crucial historical forces which, at various times between 1800 and 1930, created expansive U.S. undergraduate education and bound these institutions and their graduates to a widespread set of professional practices and organizational positions in a "credentialing" relationship. 2 Educational credentials have become prerequisites for holding the vast majority of highly rewarding jobs in America; many other types of social stratification in the U.S. today are based on occupation. This fact is not entirely a consequence of the technical necessity of higher learning in filling job vacancies; it is important to understand the varied historical determinants of this complex structure of inequality, as well as the ongoing mechanisms that encourage the recruitment of college-educated persons to advantageous positions. Beyond offering an explanation of the first historical case of mass credentialism, this study is intended to be a contribution to the

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general sociologies of upper-level labor market recruitment and the sociology of educational expansion. In order to focus on the central theme of the analysis, many issues related to historical credentialism are not fully covered in what follows. The crucial issue of the public legitimacy of education and occupational credentialing receives scant attention, although the intraorganizational legitimacy of educational credentials is covered. Although I discuss the topic of educational degree-based recruitment to workplaces in detail,

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the important issue of education-based promotion in organizations is put aside in most of what follows. Graduate education, professional education, and early twentieth-century junior college education are dealt with mainly as each pertains to 4-year undergraduate education. Class, gender, and racial/ethnic stratification in higher education are not discussed in detail. The notion of higher educational expansion in the twentieth century as it relates to the Keynesian economic theory of unemployment is not explored, because this argument is best supported by data from the post-1930 period, particularly the education-related economic policies of the post-World War II years. The Basic Argument and Historical Narrative

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I shall argue that the reason why U.S. credentialism became pervasive by 1930 was that decentralized control of higher education, coupled with extra-educational interests in college founding, created a proliferation of institutions in the early nineteenth-century, and these institutions, by various means, perpetuated themselves for some time. The more powerful of them then eliminated competition with other schools at a point where ongoing transformations of recruitment strategies in widespread labor markets encouraged hiring of college graduates as a solution to technical and controlbased recruitment uncertainties. Colleges largely accommodated labor market interests from then on, and these actions permitted a lasting basis for higher educational expansion and further credentialing of labor markets. College Founding

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The institutional basis for American undergraduate study was established with the founding of hundreds of colleges between 1800 and 1890. The number of U.S. colleges over this period grew at a pace that far exceeded the demands of population growth or the practical need [or "educated" labor. Institutions tend to perpetuate themselves through the actions of their most powerful and committed members and supporters. Within U.S. colleges up to 1880, these actions included the efforts of charismatic college presidents who sought to save schools, teachers who accepted low and frequently delayed salaries, wider religio-ethnic groups that benefited from having colleges, and students/ parents who, for various reasons, paid tuitions to attend schools. The linkage of college- founding activities of widespread interest groups to speculation in western lands, particularly to town founding and town "boosting," was a cru-

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cial, yet frequently underestimated, spur to early expansion of higher educational institutions. Numerous roundings of colleges were in part possible because neither the state nor the church exercised centralized control over higher education.

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Partly because college training was an accepted credential for entry to a limited range of occupations, nineteenth-century individual college enrollments remained low. Between 1800 and 1890, overall enrollments increased mainly as a consequence of the multiplication of schools. In the Jacksonian era (c. 18201870), colleges lacked clear connections with the recruitment process in the professions (with the exception of ministry) and, until the 1890s, colleges lacked strong credentialing powers for most positions in business and government. While many colleges had developed various sorts of professional departments in the early years, these ventures typically were short-lived, because cheap, comparable private professional education was an able competitor for students. Business training programs in colleges also failed to gain much advantage over prolific, inexpensive, and expedient private business ''colleges."

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Competition, Internal Reforms, and SystemBuilding

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Although most U.S. colleges (including many of the newly established state land-grant institutions) had increased their enrollments during the economic downturn of the 1870s, many schools were influenced by two related factors in the 1880scompetition and decreasing enrollment. First, competition between colleges became acute as new colleges continued to emerge within the regional, class, religious, and ethnic recruitment spheres of existing colleges. Second, the rate of enrollment growth slackened off. Throughout the period we are studying, tuition income was a major source of funding for most colleges. 3 In many cases, financial problems were exacerbated by failures of earlier finance strategies such as the sales of "perpetual tuition scholarships" (Salganik, 1981), unfulfilled "pledges" of monetary and other support, and untimely sales of college-owned lands.4 Nonpaying scholarship students represented ongoing costs to colleges and expectations of pledged

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support created difficulties in financial administration. In addition, the exhaustion of real estate holdings frequently left schools with inadequate operating funds. Some college officials scurried about in search of private benefactors (whose names frequently adorned the newly revived colleges), but usually without much success. The response to the slowed growth of college enrollment during the 1880s took several innovative forms; some of these innovations seem to have been aimed at perceived opportunities for credential linkages with

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professional and organizational workplaces, whereas others appear to have been desperate attempts to attract students. Students may have realized their power position with respect to enrollment incomes as they demanded administrators and faculty to adopt curricular and other reforms. Collegiate life had long been dominated by an austere religious atmosphere of discipline (Veysey, 1965:2156). In the 1870s and 1880s, the classical curriculum had come under attack from students and some faculty (Rudolf, 1978:99202). A new rash of pranksterism also was evident on many campuses. Foremost in the interests of students were changes in the classical curriculum, particularly the abolition of Latin and Greek language requirements. Students also voiced a general desire for greater "practicality" in college training, although the exact content of such practical training and its presumed relationship to the "real world" remained dubious.

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One very common reform that attempted to appease student desires for practicality concerned the substitution of modern language requirements in German and French for traditional Latin and/or Greek proficiency. Many colleges also tried to enhance their "scientific" appearances through extensions of their offerings in mathematics and natural science (e.g., new courses in elementary algebra, calculus, and zoology). These reforms, although they hardly constituted a radical departure from earlier experiments in so-called "practical" instruction, were perceived by students and professional and bureaucratic employers as evidence that colleges were sources of useful education and of suitable candidates for key positions.

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In order to bolster enrollments, elite and state universities began programs that eventually would phase out their preparatory academies (secondary schools). Such institutions established a new recruitment base in selected public high schools that were approved by college committees of overseers. Accreditation of high schools represented a departure from the traditional, patently inefficient practice of personal interviews of prospective undergraduates by college presidents (Wechsler, 1977:315). Beyond the efficiency that the high school recruitment method offered in gaining larger numbers of students, accreditation also won the support of most faculties, because it promised to raise and standardize the academic preparedness of incoming freshmen. Additional staffing made accreditation a costly administrative function, so at first accreditation was undertaken only by institutions that could afford such mechanisms. This difference produced greater economic

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stratification among institutions as accreditation proved to be an effective means of increasing enrollments in elite schools. Weaker institutions did not benefit from accreditation until the establishment of regional accreditation

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associations in the 1890s and thereafter. The creation of a highly articulated "system" of public high school and college education effectively stratified not just public high schools, but also colleges. The controlling boards of the accreditation associations were primarily composed of leading regional and national college presidents and faculty, together with prominent public high school administrators, national businessmen, professional men, and politicians. As the linkages of college degrees to powerful business, professional, and governmental positions strengthened, the representation of such persons on college boards of trustees increased. This was true not just for elite institutions, but also for less prestigious colleges; membership on boards of trustees increasingly reflected the controlling interests of graduates' workplaces.

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Credentialing

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The higher educational reforms of the late nineteenth century would have provided only temporary restoration of educational expansion had it not been for timely developments in U.S. labor markets, which encouraged credentialing relations between colleges and particular types of employers. Two broad areas of occupational change facilitated this alliance: professional and bureaucratic labor markets. One major change was the emergence and growth of middle-class, formally trained professionals in traditional practices such as law and medicine, together with enhanced educational certification in newer professions. The legitimacy of aristocratic, college-trained expertise in law, medicine, and other professions had waned during the Jacksonian period; the public was generally unconvinced that lengthy formal training was needed in these areas. Although there had been many experiments connecting professional schools to colleges, most American colleges had remained

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separate from professional schools up to the 1870s. Increased wealth among the American middle class following the economic difficulties of the 1870s reopened markets for the traditional professionals and created opportunities for new professional practices. New professions modeled their monopoly movements on the efforts of traditional professions. Still, fragmentation of professional groups along various social lines (e.g., class, region, urban/rural, knowledge bases, and ethnicity) segmented markets for professional services and cast public doubt on professional legitimacy. For the most powerful professional groups, lengthy, standardized professional education offered a solution to both problems. The increasing success of practitioners trained in professional schools led to renewed interest among colleges in mergers with leading professional schools.

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Wealthier professional schools reciprocated this interest; their applicant pool was sufficient to enable selectivity in college-based recruitment. The stronger schools also wished to distance themselves further from run- of-the-mill proprietary professional schools by requiring costly liberal arts training as a prerequisite to entry. College affiliation showed the "scientific" basis of their training in "universities" that had begun to foster scientific legitimacy during the 1880s.

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The second major labor market transformation took place in the organizational structures of some governmental, industrial, commercial, and cultural organizations. Again, control over members was a key determinant of recruitment of college graduates. New regions of worker autonomy were created in those economic enterprises that had expanded their bases of operation in the late nineteenth century. These uncertainties included not just new areas of uncertainty about the applications of technical knowledge to production (the province of engineers), but also questions about control of new positions in sales, purchasing, credit, and so onall of which entailed increasing discretionary powers for workers. In some ways, the interests of such organizations in the content of college pedagogy ran counter to those of professional groups. For large organizations, a key problem was how to keep employees loyal to organizational interests (i.e., even when occupational hierarchies were

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common and when worker expertise and autonomy tended to create quasi-professional enclaves within and across firms). If professional groups looked to collegiate experience as a means of bonding colleagues through participation in common undergraduate experiences, other organizations had specific interests in the content of the college experience as something that imparted organizational loyalty. Although acclimation to delayed gratification through the mechanism of "career structures" was critical to both professions and organizations, the hierarchy of large firms was more pronounced and required greater trained capacities for obedience to superiors. Competitiveness with outsiders also was a virtue for organizational men (vis-vis other firms), which was less important in the professions.

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Business interests influenced U.S. colleges in several ways. First, large organizations were recruitment centers for large numbers of college graduates. Second, the upper administrative bodies of colleges (including trustees) were infiltrated by powerful businessmen (Veblen, 1918). These men (females largely were excluded from educational administration at this time) managed colleges as businesses and did much to make faculty and student experiences in schools similar to work in the bureaucratic organizations the new administrators knew so well. In the case of business education, which finally was introduced under the

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auspices of such leadership, the molding of organization men was intentional. More broadly, and perhaps not intentionally, business leadership of higher education produced a similar acumen for organizational life in students enrolled in all collegiate departments.

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Prominent business and professional interests also exerted influence over colleges through alliances with powerful philanthropic foundations and accreditation organizations (Barrow, 1990; Bremner, 1960; Darknell, 1980; Howe, 1980; Lagemann, 1983; Wechsler, 1977). This influence was the first successful attempt to impose centralized control on U.S. higher education. The funds granted to colleges by foundations such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other less well-known foundations came with strings attached. In order to receive the benefits foundations offered, colleges had to meet criteria that tended to standardize the structure of higher education and weed out institutions that could not, or would not, comply with external strictures. The resultant uniformity of schools did much to improve systematic relations between various sectors of the educational system. This

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uniformity also provided standardized training, which was useful for the legitimacy of professional organizations and beneficial to recruiters of rule-habituated students to bureaucratic organizations. Pedagogy in various disciplines was standardized while, at the same time, stratification between institutions was maintained or heightened. The Carnegie Foundation, in particular, through the famous Flexner Report on medical education and other initiatives, successfully destroyed the reputations of many non-university- affiliated, proprietary professional schools. Foundation money disproportionately went to institutions where trustees, presidents, and others were affiliated with powerful business and political interests.

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Recruitment of college graduates to public sphere employment historically varied by type of employment. Administrative work in public utilities and transportation was similar to professional work in that such enterprises tended to be monopolistic and, as such, were legitimized through the social construction of public trust in responsible, disinterested management. Public trust organizations were hierarchically organized just like larger private businesses. It is not surprising to find that after 1900 the managers in such organizations often were college graduates. Not only could college graduates be expected to possess the technical skill and organizational demeanor useful to performance in hierarchical bureaucracies; these individuals also had desirable public images as reasonable, honorable, and disinterested caretakers of the public good.

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By contrast, elected officials, particularly at state and local levels,

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typically were not drawn from the college educated pool of eligibles (national senators and representatives were more likely to be college educated). Beyond the economic and status interests that governed voting, the likely reason for this fact was that performance in such offices was accountable through results. Poor performance was more easily rectified through the combined effects of limited tenure and dismissal through electoral politics. Some of the difference in securing governmental versus managerial positions had (and still has) to do with the fact that average citizens imagined they knew more about how to do effective state and local "politics" than about how to deal with the nuances of running a national railway system, a chain of department stores, or the sales department of a large electrical manufacturing firm.

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By contrast to state and local elected officialdom, U.S. higher civil service positions were an area in which college graduates made significant entry after 1890 (Bendix, 1949:3241; DiPrete, 1989). Higher civil service positions long had been patronage positions with little or no certification or examination criteria prerequisite to job entry (Hoogenboom, 1968; Skowronek, 1982; Van Riper, 1958). The beginning of civil service reforms in the late 1870s, the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, and the weakening of patronage thereafter brought considerable movement of new social types, including college men, into federal bureaucracies, although thoroughgoing college credentialing of higher civil service positions happened only after 1922 (DiPrete, 1989:110). The U.S. Civil Service examination system, the result of late nineteenthcentury recruitment and promotion reforms, allowed noncollege-educated persons to hold many positions, even though the content of

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some of these examinations were biased toward those who had received college training. Agricultural administration offers an interesting contrast to some forms of governmental service. Extensive federal, state, and local agricultural administration arose in the early twentieth century and, like other newer governmental administrations, had no firm tradition of patronage hiring. As a newer administrative division that grew just after state universities gained enrollment and financial advantages over small liberal arts colleges, from the beginning agricultural administration was dominated by graduates of state land-grant institutions.

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The above historical synopsis was an effort to introduce the main forces that culminated in widespread undergraduate education and credentialism in the United States. What began in the 1890sas a coincidence of the needs of large public and private organizations, select wings of professions, and the immediately preceding actions of college administrators to satisfy students and otherwise bolster their enrollmentsbecame by 1900 a more orchestrated constellation of occupational and

Page 10

collegiate actions. A significant outcome of the actions of colleges, professional associations, private business interests, accreditation and philanthropic associations, and the state was either state-backed or less formal credential monopolies of many rewarding occupational positions. The enrollments of colleges increased tremendously as a consequence of publicly acknowledged occupational linkages. Not every professional group had equal success in excluding nondegree-holding candidates, nor was the credentialing of powerful governmental and business positions complete by 1930; still, the trend toward spiraling enrollments and everincreasing education-based occupational monopolies was well in place by this time. Historical Demographics of Higher Educational Change

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Some arguments about educational expansion and credentialism are unconvincing partly because they fail to provide even gross statistical evidence of the changes that took place, let alone show causal mechanisms that account for these changes. An overview of the sorts of educational change evidenced in several key data sources will be helpful at the outset of our study. With these facts before us, we will be in a better position to see the shortcomings of existing theories of credentialism that are discussed in the next chapter. Data on Higher Education

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Because there are several possible ways of conceiving educational expansion, it is necessary to delimit the sorts of expansion relevant to the present study. I am concerned with growth in numbers of higher educational institutions, student enrollment, and degrees granted to students. For my purposes, several other types of educational expansion are secondary concerns treated mainly insofar as they impinge on institutional, enrollment, and credential expansion. These include expansion of the curriculum (e.g., additions of practical and scientific courses), diversification of student and other college populations ("expansion" is not equivalent to "democratization" in the case of the United States), and diversification of administrative capacities of schools (bureaucratization).

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Data concerning early educational expansion are incomplete. The most reliable information sources are the archival records of student enrollments in individual institutions, but efforts to gain insight about overall U.S. enrollments and multiplication of institutions are complicated

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by the lack of archival data on students and by uncertainties over the actual or mere "paper" existences of schools. The most complete archival information is available for colleges that were successful and/or affiliated with church and state record-keeping authorities, but systematic bias is present in these data.

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For comprehensive enrollment data we may look to the records of the United States Bureau of Education (USBE; 187319:30). The USBE began collecting information from educational institutions of all sorts in 1870; these records, while continuous from that point on, leave us with several interpretive problems. One difficulty is the inclusiveness of the data: Figures regarding institutions that were not solicited or did not respond to surveys are not given in USBE reports, so we do not know rates of response. It seems likely that reporting improved as the USBE grew in size and sophistication, thereby somewhat exaggerating the appearance of educational growth in later years. A further problem, particularly in early reports, is the lack of consistent breakdowns of data (e.g., by types of schools or by student gender).

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For the years prior to 1870, the most comprehensive data available are those provided by Burke (1982) in a demographic analysis of enrollments, institutions, student backgrounds, and student careers. This remarkable 10-year project tabulated national and regional data not only on numbers of students, schools, and job placements, but also on student ages at entry and student migratory patterns. Burke's study drew nationwide data from archival sources within and outside colleges. Included in his work are some important observations regarding the interpretation of USBE figures and insightful critiques of early studies of college closings (Tewksberry, 1932) and student careers (Burritt, 1912). The strength of Burke's work lies in its intended goal of filling the information gap left by the late establishment of the USBE and in his critique of naive assumptions about colleges. The greatest weaknesses in Burke's data derive from missing information for colleges known to have existed;

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a rigid definition of and subsequent focus on "liberal arts colleges"; exclusion of detailed information about struggling institutions (often classified by Burke as "academies"), state universities, professional schools, technical institutes, and normal schools, and a concentration on eastern seaboard cases for discussion and, I suspect, collection of data (the latter problem is disturbing, given Burke's (1982:19) stated objective of avoiding the pitfalls of "Whig'' educational history). Given available sources, together with limitations, we may begin constructing a picture of U.S. educational expansion. The overall growth of U.S. institutions and enrollments is represented in Tables 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4, generated from Burke's and USBE data. 5 The general pattern dis-

TABLE 1.1 Number of U.S. Higher Educational Institutions a Enrollments as Percentages of the Population Age 1821, 1870 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 No. of Institutions 563 Decennial % change Enrollment (1,000s) 52 Decennial % change Mean Enrollment 92.4 Decennial % change Enrollment as a % of 1.68 population age 18-21 Secondary school graduates 2.0 as a % of population age 17 Note: Figures for "higher education" include universities, coll 1930, junior colleges. For universities operating more than on "institution." Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (1961), Historical Statistic

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played in these tables is one of growth, both in num important historical variations may be noted for ins tions of students in various types of programs and i slowed growth, either for higher education as a who 1800 to 1840, liberal arts enrollments and college r rollments, particularly in theology after 1810, show enced a simultaneous curtailment of enrollment gro 1850) and new roundings of liberal arts and theolog This decelerated growth was short-lived, for the 18 roundings (a total of 88) and a growth of enrollmen continued a pattern of expansion across almost ever period of enrollment and founding expansion, parti a period of curtailed growth of institutions and enro education, which largely was

TABLE 1.2 Students in Selected U.S. Higher Education Prog 1,000,000 in the U.S. Population, 18721899 Year College Law Medicine Theology Total 1872 573 49 1873 739 52 1874 749 61 1875 736 61 1876 706 59 1877 701 61 1878 781 61 1879 775 62 1880 770 62 1881 755 63 1882 731 57 1883 741 49 1884 742 49 1885 687 53 1886 690 54 1887 688 61 1888 729 64 1889 850 72

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1890 901 82 1891 980 94 1892 1,037 105 1893 1,087 107 1894 1,128 130 1895 1,158 139 1896 1,142 146 1897 1,193 163 1898 1,196 163 1899 1,233 166 Note: "College" refers to undergraduate liberal arts and techn figures cited here include students enrolled in independent pro universities and colleges. Source: U.S. Bureau of Education (1900), Education Report,

TABLE 1.3 U.S. Higher Educational Enrollments by Selected Type of Ins

Type of Institution 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 18 Liberal Arts 1,156 1,939 2,566 4,647 67.7 32.3 81.1 % change Law 21 50 48 116 138.1 -.04 141.7 % change Medical 50 541 1,032 2,349 982.0 90.8 127.6 % change Theological 10 32 226 214.2 130.0 606.3 710 % change Normal % change Technical % change Women's % change Total 1,237 2,562 3,646 7,822 1 % change. 107.1 42.3 114.5 Note: For 18701900, figures were rounded (by the source cite Source: Colin Burke(1982), American Collegiate Populations

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TABLE 1.4 Liberal Arts College Foundings and Closures, 18001859

College Locations 180009 181019 182029 183039 184049 18 New England in operation 8 % of total 25 failures 0 % of total 0 Middle Atlantic in operation 8 % of total 25 failures 0 % of total 0 South Atlantic in operation 11 % of total 34 failures 0 % of total 0 Southwest in operation 5 % of total 16

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failures % of total Midwest in operation % of total failures % of total U.S. TOTAL in operation new roundings failures

1 100 0 0 0 0 32 12 1

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Note: The states included in various regions are as follows: "N "Southwest": KY, LA, AL, MS, MO, TN, TX; ''Middle Atlan WI; "South Atlantic": DC, DE, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA; Weste

The number of colleges in operation includes the new roundin in operation over given decades does not follow from the num en decade, or their sum. In the original source, it is impossible decades. These discrepancies make it advisable to view the da sions only from the most general trends. Despite these inadeq from which the data were drawn is, in certain respects, the mo ings currently available. Tewksberry's (1932) data on pre-Civ best comparison with the data above, but Tewksberry used a m tality rates only in terms of survival of pre-Civii War colleges tion about the precise timing of college failures. Source: Colin B. Burke (1982), American Collegiate Populat

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situated in separate professional schools). This slowed growth was true even for normal schools, which had registered a fourfold increase in enrollments in the 1870s. Recovery was sudden in the 1890s and continued into the 1900s, but this growth was not a simple consequence of new college-roundings, as the total number of schools slightly declined in these decades (-2.1% in the 1890s and -2.6% in the 1900s). Rather, the new enrollment growth was situated in existing institutions and, as in the 1870s, in normal schools. The years following 1910 demonstrate remarkable growth of enrollments (up 70.7% in the 1910s and up 91% in the 1920s) coupled with larger enrollments as percentages of the eligible age group (represented as 18-to 21-year-olds) attending colleges (5.12% in 1910, 8.20% in 1920, and 12.95% in 1930). Many new institutions came into existence between 1910 and 1930, but over one-third of these were junior colleges with low mean

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enrollments. A key characteristic of the 18901930 period was consolidated enrollment growth. Increases in the Overall U.S. Population

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One possible cause of U.S. higher educational expansion might be an increasing number of persons in the college-eligible age group, which produced a growth in schools to accommodate their needs. Enrollment increases throughout our period of study were dependent on increases in the eligible age group in the U.S. population. We acknowledge that this population increased, albeit at varying rates, throughout the period under investigation. Still, college enrollments grew at rates that exceeded predictable increases from population growth. College enrollments as a percentage of 18- to 21-year-olds increased from 1.68% to 12.95% from 1870 to 1930. 6 These figures suggest that at the time a strikingly large proportion of the U.S. population was attending college.7 Were we to conceive of higher educational expansion as a phenomenon that was more characteristic of certain sectors of the population, the figures on expanded enrollments are even more surprising. We know, for

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example, that a considerable portion of the U.S. population increases up to the 1920s was due to immigration. Many immigrant groups were too poor to afford (in various senses of the "cost" of attendance) to send children to college, whereas other ethnic groups lacked a tradition of college education, even among their more well-to-do members. Certainly the foreign born, and likely a generation or so of their offspring, were underrepresented in higher education. College students were disproportionately "Anglo" in ethnic origin. There is strong evidence suggesting student bodies were heavily composed of this same, relatively small, ethnic group.

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How Much Did Increasing Female Enrollment Matter?

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We might surmise that higher educational expansion occurred due to the increasing enrollments of females. Comprehensive historical gender distribution figures of U.S. college students are difficult to find, especially for the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Jencks and Riesman (1968:9293) boldly assert that, after the Civil War, "[t]here was considerable growth in enrollment, but this was mainly because women began entering colleges in large numbers." Unfortunately, the supporting evidence for such a claim is not forthcoming in the sources the authors cite, nor is there, to my knowledge, comprehensive data available on the subject. Scattered gender breakdowns from individual schools are of no help here. Although it is probable that males numbered somewhat greater than females in the early years of U.S. higher education (especially in professional departments and schools), I suspect that Jencks and Riesman have overestimated the extent of male

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student domination of nineteenth-century student rosters. Consequently, the absence in later years of colleges with overwhelmingly male enrollments should come as no surprise. To be sure, the growth of normal schools and their increasingly female student bodies in the early twentieth century were important determinants of college enrollment growth between 1890 and 1930, but this fact (not mentioned by Jencks and Riesman) does not justify the dismissal of other determinants of enrollment growth. 8

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It is possible that Jencks and Riesman were looking at U.S. Census data on the bachelor's and first professional degrees conferred to women from 1870 onward. These data are shown in Table 1.5. Two problems emerge in determining female representation in colleges by virtue of these data. First, we are given no breakdown by type of degree conferred (bachelor's or professional), although we know that women largely were excluded from medical, legal, and theological schools from 1870 to 1930; thus, when we see women received only 14.9% of all degrees in 1870, we should realize that their representation in liberal arts programs of colleges was much higher than that. Second, it is impossible to estimate enrollments based on degrees conferred because some students drop out and some degrees take longer to acquire than others. Nevertheless, we see in these data that women made their greatest enrollment gains in the post-1910 period (from earning 22.6% of all

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degrees in 1910 to earning 39.9% of all degrees in 1930). We have better evidence about female attendance for later years. Table 1.6 presents data aggregated by the U.S.B.E. for 1890 to 1928. Female representation grew from 31.6% to 42.1% of students in collegiate programs over this period. Male-dominated "collegiate" programs (as

TABLE 1.5 Bachelor's and First Professional Degrees Conferred by U.S. Institutions of Higher Education, by Sex, 18701930 (1,000s)

Degree Earners 1930 1920 1910 1900 1890 1880 1870 Male 73. decennial % increase 130. Female 48. decennial % increase 194. % Female 39. TOTAL 122. decennial % increase 152. Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census (1961), Historical Statistic

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opposed to "normal" programs) of normal schools w were decades of significant growth of female enroll 37.8% to 42.1% in the 1920s). 9 Greater gains for w programs where female enrollments grew from 17.2 engineering departments, however, female attendan to assume that "being female" were a separable cau only around 10% of the overall post-1890 expansio that account. Sociological vs. Historical Knowledge: A Methodological Overture

This work is a "case study" that attempts to underst the use of essentially "comparative" methods of exp unit of analysis). My methodology is not "interpreti tinct from "explanatory" methods. I seek in the chap ism through the use of general principles of social s interest-bound collective motivations to historically follow is informed by

TABLE 1.6 Gender Distribution of Students in Collegiate, Graduate, Prof and Engineering Departments of U.S. Higher Educational Ins Depa Collegiate Graduate Professional Engineering Year N % N % N % N % 1890 65,274 2,382 31.6 1900 104,998 5,831 35.1 1910 174,213 9,370 35.1 1920 341,082 15,612 37.8 1928 695,219 44,165 42.1 Note: Data for "collegiate" students excludes special, unclassi winter short-course students. Students enrolled in collegiate ( mal schools also are excluded from these figures. "Professional" students include those enrolled in theology, law medicine. Students enrolled in teacher education departments hence the great underepresentation of females. "Engineering" students include those enrolled in civil, mechan departments. For 1928, these categories constituted 66% of al data are not available on the gender distribution of engineerin course of study would have been as male-dominated as other

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the methodological perspective outlined by Max W methodological work was cast in direct opposition standing of the "essences" of historical data. Becau between these approaches to historical work elsewh on the nuances of the philosophy and methodology my general disposition toward methodological issu tion; I also hold a view toward haughty methodolog spired Weber to write of the rather tedious methodo

[Methodological pestilence] can very easily lead to the st recalls. In order to walk, it is not necessary to

Page 20 know the anatomy of one's legs. Anatomy is of practical importance only when something has gone wrong (Weber, 19031906:13). 10

I do not view this study as an original contribution to sociological methodology; the explanatory methods I employ are quite standard.

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Is this study "sociological" or "historical"? So far as common usages of these terms go, I think it is both; I try to explain a particular "valuerelevant" (in Weber's sense of the term) historical outcome with the aid of general sociological concepts (i.e., I employ methods of theoretical deduction) and I attempt to develop general sociological theory in light of the U.S. case of credentialism. In other words, the value of this study is tied to our understanding of "how we got where we are" and to our knowledge of the general sociology of educational expansion and education-based labor market recruitment. I said that this study is not "interpretive'' in the usual meaning of this genre of research. Closely related to the idea of interpretive sociology is the notion of "historicist" accounts of events that posit the "uniqueness" of social scientific (as opposed to natural scientific) inquiry (Kiser & Hechter, 1991; Stinchcombe, 1978). I wish to stress that the discussion that follows is not an

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example of historicist sociology, least of all in the sense that I deny the possibility of causal generalization. Although the constellations and sequences of causes leading to U.S. credentialism were rather unique in that they led to a "first case," the causes as such were of a thoroughly general and, I think, generalizable nature.

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Two further methodological points are in order. First, the determinants of U.S. higher educational expansion and credentialism are not "necessary" causes, but contingencies. Crucial determinants of U.S. expansion were absent elsewhere in the world and countervailing forces within the U.S. case threatened actual outcomes at certain historical junctures. I do not wish to imply that other nations either took or will have to take exactly the same path as the United States in establishing similar linkages between higher education and jobs (although I think the general preconditions of U.S. credentialism must be met by some means if similarly extensive credentialing structures are to emerge), nor do I argue that current U.S. trends are immutable.

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Second, many of the forces I discuss involve corporate rather than individual actors. Too much traditional educational history focuses on the roles of particular "great men" (not women, as men truly did play a preponderant role in educational administration in the period presently under investigation). Although I readily will admit the significance of charismatic leadership in the administration of early U.S. colleges, exclusive concentration on "what so-and-so accomplished" obfuscates

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general causal analysis. The primary collective interests covered in this analysis emerge in three contexts: (1) state, church, and organized private control of higher education; (2) institutional foundings based in religious/ethnic group interests and various coalitions of land speculative interests; and (3) enrollment growth as a consequence of internal educational actors' desires for more students and employers' needs for graduates. The Chapters That Follow I begin my argument in Chapter 2 with a consideration of some existing theories of credentialism. I consider the strengths and weaknesses of functionalism, human capital theory, social class-based theories, multiethnic conflict theory, and Margaret Archer's sociology of higher educational expansion.

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Chapter 3 proposes a theory of credentialism that avoids the theoretical and empirical problems embedded in previous theories. I argue that an adequate theory of historical credentialism must show crucial variables that allow higher educational and occupational relations to begin and to flourish. These variables include sufficient distribution of societal wealth, a "tradition" of higher educational credentialing of jobs, decentralized control of higher education and labor markets that allows substantial early institution building, and a subsequent consolidation of the educational institution and elimination or subordination of educational competition. A major consequence of such consolidation is a standardization of educational contents that facilitates labor market needs for recruitment.

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In Chapter 4, I discuss the significance of decentralized control of higher education (i.e., the absence of centralized state or religious control) to early and proliferous college founding. Noncredential-related factors may account for the early multiplication of colleges. A peculiarity of the U.S. case, also discussed in this chapter, was the relationship of college founding to economic interests of major and minor real estate speculators.

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Chapter 5 delimits a crucial period of transition that occurred in the United States in the 18801930 period. In the 1880s, enrollment growth slowed a great deal, competition between institutions came to a head, and weaker schools were in danger of closing. The possibility of either a set of plural higher educational types or a much smaller, elite set of colleges was real. I shall examine the responses colleges and external organizations made to this situation between 1890 and 1930, which restored

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high rates of enrollment growth and placed competing institutions in stratified positions in an educational system. Continued expansion of higher education depended on changes outside the colleges themselves. The central assumption of Chapter 6 is that massive higher education is most probable where specific labor market recruitment needs are met by the selection of college graduates. Particularly after 1890, but predating this point in some workplaces, new recruitment "uncertainties" arose in expanding professional and bureaucratic labor markets. These uncertainties initially favored the selection of college graduates, but once college graduates joined organizations and acquired recruitment responsibilities, the selection of college graduates (as opposed to those with other qualifications) for particular jobs became an even more common practice.

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2 The Historical Sociology of Credentialism: A Critical Appraisal

The purpose of this chapter is to weigh the utility of existing theories of higher educational expansion and labor market affiliation, particularly as these theories apply to the case of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. In considering alternative theories of credentialism, I see some major shortcomings in previous treatments of the topic; I attempt to overcome some of these theoretical inadequacies in Chapter 3.

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If changes in the institutional nexus of higher education and the labor market were in some way responsible for expanded college enrollments in the years following 1890, we might expect to find specific social groups, embedded in particular and changing interest-bound situations, producing changes through conscious actions. Such a "social action-based" explanation for the rise of credentialism is not the only possible type of explanation. It is conceivable that credentialism was produced entirely through structural circumstances that were quite separate from actors' apparent "interests," although a theory of the rise of credentialism that implies no deliberate social action in producing educational and occupational configurations of early twentieth-century America does not yet exist. In this section, I consider four theories (functionalism, human capital theory, social reproduction theory, and multi-ethnic conflict theory) that assume, but fail to demonstrate, that particular

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actors brought about expansive credentialism, as well as a fifth theory (Archer, 1979), which generally acknowledges the roles of concrete actors in producing credentialism but excludes these actors' interests from the sustenance of credential systems. In their failures to specify viable and/or concrete actors, each theory falls back on a basically structural explanation of the rise or maintenance of credentialism.

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Functionalism, Education, and Occupational Skills The notion that higher educational expansion in the nineteenth century somehow occurred as a consequence of industrialization is a part of the popular imagination that owes much to sociological functionalism. Structural-functionalism is a theoretical orientation, which posits that the elements of social systems (e.g., societal institutions, organizations, and positions) tend to adjust to changes in other elements in ways that maintain the equilibrium of social systems. Burton Clark (1962) provides a classic statement of the structural-functionalist argument with regard to higher education. After pointing out that the United States has passed through the stages of primary and secondary industrialism into a tertiary economy, Clark explains the mechanisms that brought about educational expansion:

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the educational threshold of employment has been increasingly raised since the advent of the Industrial Revolution and especially in the last half-century [19121962]. Labor on the family farm did not demand literacy, but skilled jobs and clerical work in the factory demanded literacy and more. Now, in a society where automation is taking over the tasks of routine labor, a large proportion of jobs increasingly falls into the upper ranges of skill and expertise, in the range from professional to technician. Largescale enterprisebig business, big government, big labor, big educationdemands managers, professionals, and technicians, and these posts demand training beyond the high school for the most part . . . these men are trained through the educational institutionthrough schools and colleges and the educational systems that are springing up in industry and elsewhere (Clark, 1962:48).

In a similar vein, A. H. Halsey relates how the forces of industrialization have transformed U.S. higher education from an elite to a "mass" institution:

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The educational characteristics of a technological society are clearest where they are most advancedin America. The explosive expansion which has taken place there in the demand for high scientific manpower has not only created conditions of chronic shortage of supply; it has also transformed the universities. . . . Under these circumstances the function of universities as nurseries for elite groups is overlaid by their new function as a mass higher educational service in an emergent technological society (Halsey, 1960:123). 1

Many other writers, most notably Daniel Bell (1973) have insinuated that the transformation to industrial and, later, to "postindustrial" or "tech-

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nological" societies has forced a closer relationship between higher education and occupations. Bell (1973:167265) extends the basic functionalist argument by showing how the research function of major universities, beginning in the 1890s and intensifying from then onward, has itself become a source of dynamism. The root argument within most functionalist explanations of educational expansion may be summarized as follows: 1. Technological innovation in economies generally raises the skill levels required to perform jobs. Manual labor jobs diminish, new knowledge-based jobs grow, and knowledge needs increase within existing occupations.

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2. Formal educational institutions multiply and/ or expand in order to teach individuals the skills required to do more complex tasks. 3. Higher educational institutions themselves become progenitors of new technologies, thereby furthering the complexity of jobs and sustaining educational growth.

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In critique of this theory, we may begin by noting there are no actors' interests guiding changes, save for the "interests" all citizens might have in an efficient social system. True, it might be possible to find actors that are producing changes, and adjustments, but I am not aware of an analysis of this sort, nor am I confident a convincing one is feasible. The way the theory stands, we are led to believe that institutions are thinking creatures, which, of course, they are not. But even the empirical consequences of this theory are untenable on several counts. First, we must question whether technological innovation necessarily leads to an increase in the skill levels of all jobs. Certainly, an equally plausible claim would be that, while a few jobs may be upgraded as a result of technical innovation, it is likely even more jobs may become "deskilled" by the same processes, in which case the expansion of schooling seems odd. 2 In its naive form, the structural-functional

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theory suggests the notion of technical innovation as a development of machine technologies and of higher educational expansion as an adaption to the need for a trained labor force to run these new machines. Unfortunately, the college graduates from 18801930, with the exception of engineering graduates, were not destined for these types of jobs; their occupational concentrations overwhelmingly were in professional and managerial positions. Now, if one were to conceive of the "skills" needed in workplaces and taught in schools primarily as language skills (as the quote by Clark, above, partially suggests) and the ability to assimilate written or verbal information, then the functionalist argument makes more sense, even though this

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would require a substantial reworking of the concept of technological "needs" in industrialized societies. I shall attempt a specification of this aspect of functional theory in the next chapter; presently, it is necessary to examine additional weaknesses in the standard functionalist argument.

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A second claim of functionalist theory is that new job skills were taught effectively in colleges. Again, machine technologies were not taught in colleges to any great extent. Stenographers, typists, telegraphers, and adding machine or cash register clerks sought formal training in operator skills mainly in proprietary business "colleges." These impermanent storefront schools with their courses of indeterminant length, enrollments beginning any day of the year, and, frequently, lack of graduation and certification powers hardly resembled "colleges," nor were they loci of enrollment expansions. Moreover, the skills required for mechanically-oriented positions often could be learned more effectively on the job or in private study. Nobel (1977:167256) has shown that many industries established their own company schools to accomplish the technical training of engineers, thus suggesting another available means of technical training.

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In traditional higher education, functionalist theory points to changes in the college curriculum as evidence of the increasing correspondence of the technical skill needs of industrialization to the provision of such skills in colleges. In the late nineteenth century, the curricula of U.S. colleges purportedly became more practical and less dominated by religious and classical tradition. State land-grant agricultural/industrial universities and the new "research" universities of the 1890s were the supposed leaders of this modernizing movement, followed immediately by other colleges. As I shall show in Chapter 6, this line of thought confuses college propaganda schemes about practical instruction that sought to boost enrollments with the facts about what was taught in most colleges. The curricular reforms of most schools involved very little in the way of provision of concrete job skills. Although requirements became more lax with regard to Greek, Latin, and theology, the major

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additions to late nineteenth-century curricula were modern languages and slightly advanced mathematics and science courses. In many cases, students were given some freedom in choosing "electives" and "major" concentrations, but this innovation did not really show students how to "perform" various jobs. Even state and research universities of the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, apart from their agricultural, engineering, and graduate division courses (mainly created after 1900), resembled denominational colleges so far as curricula were concerned. Most of the expansion in requirements to engage in occupations occurred within positions that existed prior to advanced industrializa-

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tion and that persisted afterwards. The traditional professions of law, medicine, and teaching increased their college degree requirements for entry either to practice or professional school. In most cases, the requirement for advanced professional training preceded changes in the technical complexities involved in the practice of professions.

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If educational expansion was a strict consequence of the skill requirements of jobs, one would expect to find considerable variation in the number of years of schooling required in various majors or in the number of courses required as preparation for jobs of varying complexity. Although there was some variation among liberal arts colleges in this regard prior to 1900, undergraduate education became ever more uniform in the early twentieth century, that is, they were 4-year institutions with around 120 course credits required for graduation.

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Standardization of the length of schooling also was evident in professional education. Rapid increases in the years of schooling required for theological, medical, legal, and dentistry degrees occurred in the 1890s, well in advance of demonstrable improvements in the technical sophistication or efficacy of each practice (Parsons, 1900). The reason for these changes was not that the skill requirements of the labor force were standardized, but that accreditation and philanthropic foundation organizations and colleges themselves acted in the interests of bureaucratic employers and professional groups in enforcing uniform and rising admissions and graduation requirements. Educational expansion has not merely kept pace with the supposed skill needs of industrialization; it has exceeded these, to the point where some applicants are viewed by some employers as "overqualified" for positions.

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Lastly, functionalist theory, especially as formulated by Bell (1973), argues the colleges became producers of new technologies that maintained the process of occupational change and educational growth. It is here that one may speak of a functionalist argument in the sense of a peculiar causal explanation that excludes the intentions of social actors and instead posits a "feedback loop" through which a cause is maintained by its consequence. The logical structure of such an argument is summarized in Figure 2.1: Basically, the functionalist argument states that the Industrial Revolution created technological innovations in workplaces (X), and increasing technological sophistication in such environments made employers seek out individuals with appropriate skills. The changing skill requirements of workplaces favored educational institutions (Z), which were at once expansive enough and instructionally oriented to the provision of numerous trained workers. The assumption is

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that nonvocationally oriented institutions failed to expand or died due to their inability to take advantage of labor market needs for skilled workers. Once

Figure 2.1 Technical Skills and Educational Expansio

this relationship between colleges and the workforc lished, colleges became providers of new technolog (for exactly what reason, we are not sure; the typica the introduction of German-modeled "science" and the curricular and organizational structures of colle leges became creators of new technical knowledge) pleting the feedback loop. 3

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I have already alluded to the problem of establishin between technical and occupational change in jobs inated by degree holders. A further question arises one know educational change was unaffected by co of college actors to changing labor markets, or that market groups did not consciously change the ways ted their affairs? Much evidence suggests that exact maneuvers took place; this fact demands analysis in types of interests that guided such actions. Employe ested in more than just technically skilled recruits f skills often were more important to employers. Fun mentation has provided little insight about this aspe al recruitment. Furthermore, the "research" function not always geared toward the creation of technical i use in industry, commerce, government, and so on. themselves were occupational groups within univer such, they frequently were recalcitrant to the sorts o ence that such a linkage to private-sector technolog suggests (Ben-David, 1971:13968). Beyond this, m nical innovation that guided industry was produced gineers and company research institutes (Caullery,

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1975:17292; Nobel, 1977), so why were universitie continued technical innovation?

In sum, the functional theory fails to establish empi support of hypothesized causal relations between te change, labor market skill changes in credentialed j plus the theory fails to refute other evidence that se considerable

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intentionality of corporate actors in the labor market, in schools, and elsewhere. Too Much Economic Rationality in the Wrong Place: Human Capital Theory

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The fundamental postulate of human capital theory (Becker, 1964; Schultz, 1961) is that increases in schooling are responses to increasing demands for skilled labor in workplaces; individuals calculate the monetary returns of investments in schooling and enroll in order to increase their "human capital" (i.e., their attractiveness to prospective employers who seek skilled labor). Because all individuals seek to better their chances in the labor market, educational levels continue to rise unless they are counteracted by the actual and/or lost-opportunity costs of education. Again, it is the student (and perhaps his or her parents and advisors) who measures the costs and benefits of education, and then acts according to an optimizing strategy. As it typically has been the case that better educated persons get better jobs, and because educational levels have tended to rise in highly industrialized nations, the human capital

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hypothesis is consistent with some general educational and labor market facts.

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The human capital thesis is similar to the functionalist argument in that both tend to accept at face value the relationship between educational training and job skills. The main difference between them is that human capital theory suggests who acts in a manner that produces educational expansionstudents and employers. The specification of actors in human capital theory is an improvement over functionalist theories on the topic. Unfortunately, these actors too often merely are postulated in such a way as not to contradict very general labor market and enrollment trends; the actual reasons why people enroll in schools or hire graduates are not examined in sufficient detail to verify the postulated optimizing rationality about acquiring skills for the labor market. The nuances involved in measuring the relationship between various occupational skills and actual educational training are just as poorly spelled out in human capital theory as in functionalism, so we

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shall not dwell on this. Although one can readily accept that there must be some economic (and/ or status) return for students if educational systems are to expand, it is not at all clear where students will set the limits of such returns (if, in fact, they think this way at all), nor are students' reasons for accepting varying rates of return from identical investments obvious. Human

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capital theory provides little insight into why certain thresholds of education (degrees) are more correlated with particular jobs than ''years of schooling," or how, historically (and sometimes abruptly), these thresholds emerged.

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The main problem with human capital theory is that students often do not really calculate the economic returns of education very well. This is the case partly because students usually do not attempt such estimations and partly because when they do attempt them, they frequently have bad information. A principal reason why secondary school and college students sometimes haphazardly pursue human capital is that they must make decisions about appropriate schools, curricula, and so on well in advance of their entries to various labor markets. Labor markets may be quite volatile, in terms of both reductions in demands for the positions that students prepare for and opportunities for positions that did not exist at the time of students' early training decisions. As these educational decisions usually are commitments in the sense that alterations of training decisions are either impossible or costly, a great deal of uncertainty confronts the student who wants to act in

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accordance with the calculative rationality specified by human capital theory.

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A second reason why many students do not think very seriously about the skills required for jobs is that they let schools (teachers, counselors, etc.) do their thinking for them. Students often place a great deal of trust in the abilities of educators to offer instruction that provides job skills; school personnel very much define the realities of the occupational world for students. Such definitions may work to the detriment of students and to the benefit of faculties in given disciplines, or in the interests of school administrators who push particular vocational ideologies in order to increase enrollments. Students thus frequently look upon school as a place where they need not think about the labor market. In a sense, their improved employment chances are guaranteed, although, I would argue, not so much by the inculcation of skills as by membership in a status group that includes educated people already in the workforce and charged with hiring powers.

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A final reason why students frequently are uninformed about the relationship between schooling and jobs is that many students don't go to a school looking just for job skills; they seek out and find rather good information about a variety of other reasons for enrolling at a given school. The average American high school graduate entering a college (or his or her parents) typically has a nebulous idea of the prestige of a given college (relative to other schools they know about) and knows more about how many of his or her friends will be in attendance, the record of the college football or basketball team, the gender ratio of the student

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body, and the town night life than about the departments of business, accounting, or economics. Colleges are places that offer homogenous sexual markets, sociability, escape from parental control, and entertainment. For parents of students, some colleges may be perceived as sheltered cultural environments where their children will be safe from the social "pollution" of outside groups. 4

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All this criticism of student economic rationality is not to say that the relationship between having higher levels of formal education and holding particular jobs is uninteresting, nor is it my intention to deny there are any rational actions undertaken by students and employers. It appears that one of the important things we need to explain is how students who lack adequate information about the job market, or even fail to think about it much, still wind up in different jobs than individuals who do not take time off for schooling. The Ruling Class, Higher Education, and Occupations

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Numerous social class-based studies of higher educational and occupational control have appeared in recent years (Apple, 1982; Barrow, 1990; Bernstein, 197175; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Carnoy & Levin, 1985; Smith, 1974). Not surprisingly, most of these works have concentrated more on the basic meaning of credentialism as conscious or unwitting "reproduction" of the ruling class (quite frequently just one class) and oppression of the working class (again, just one group) than on the historical emergence of this purported essence of higher education. The question of the causes of higher educational expansion remains, for the most part, secondary in much Marxian sociology of higher education. I shall address several general objections to typical Marxian interpretations of American higher education, then I shall show that the logical structure of such analysis is beset with the same flaw as functionalist theory, namely, the failure to specify and

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substantiate concrete actors that bring about particular outcomes. Similar to functionalist theorists, Marxian scholars have tended to accept the notion that "skills" are learned in colleges; the main difference is these skills are controlled by the bourgeoisie in the Marxian interpretation, not by the meritorious individuals who are featured in functionalist analysis. The failure of Marxian scholars seriously to question the objective values of the educational and scientific institutions of societies is in keeping with the thinking of Marx himself. Rather than entertaining the possibility that such institutions are simply epiphenomena, most Marxists seem to see some potential emancipatory capacities in

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education and science. 5 Another familiar theme, popular among humanistically oriented Marxists and reminiscent of Thorstein Veblen's (1918) critique of U.S. higher education, is that the transformation to vocational training in the colleges (again, taken at face value as an actual rather than an ideological shift designed by educators) was the work of capitalists who needed skilled labor.

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A Marxian interpretation of credentialism in the United States is particularly problematic due to the difficulties involved in speaking of conscious and extensive social classes (classes that are formed from the collusion of a wide spectrum of occupations) in American society. In Britain, to be sure, it makes a great deal of sense to speak of a class-based domination of the state, the economy, and the universities. But the relationship between degrees and jobs never reached the same levels in Britain as in the United States and this was due partly to the absence of traditional class-based control of major institutions in America. The same may be said of a number of other industrialized European states. This problem of showing "who rules America" is also evident in Marxian analyses of the labor market, from which we get the impression that all that is really going on is conflict between owners and workers. This predisposition ignores the fact that occupational groups frequently

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engage in labor market competitions with one another, and this is not necessarily fostered by the owners of capitalist enterprises. Of course, within the Marxian scheme, these conflicts are due to the "false consciousness" of the participants; as such, the conflicts only prove how thoroughgoing the real source of the conflict between capitalists and wage laborers is. These intellectual gymnastics make the Marxian notion of social class unfalsifiable, but do little to help us understand the concrete struggles between educational or occupational groups.

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It is curious that Marxian analysis has not been able to successfully integrate the state into the structures of higher educational domination in the United States in the period from 1800 to 1930. The reason, we would argue, is that the federal government really did not exert an overriding and direct influence on the higher educational system at this time. David Smith (1974:11233) circumvents this problem by equating the actions of the philanthropic foundations with the actions of the state; since Carnegie and Rockefeller controlled the state, this really was state intervention. This view is a gross oversimplification of the controlling interests of the foundations. Occupational groups were pivotal influences on foundation policies, as were educators themselves. Furthermore, capitalists had enough foresight to affect education through the ideological apparatus of the democratic statethey did not really need the

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foundations for the purposes Smith outlines. On the other hand, education

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(especially elementary and secondary education, but also at later dates junior college education and public university education) was influenced a good deal by state and local government. 6 Bourdieu and Passeron on Class Reproduction

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The reproduction of social classes is closely associated with the works of Bourdieu and Passeron (1970).7 These authors are not, strictly speaking, Marxian in their approaches. There is a good deal of Weberian market analysis of capitalism in Bourdieu and Passeron (and some Durkheimian evolutionism). Bourdieu and Passeron (1970:5) begin their analysis of education with the following claim: "All pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power." Symbolic violence is "power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force" (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970:4). In modern societies, the educational system has become the primary locus of socialization to the class structure. The culture of the school is arbitrary in the sense it represents but one of many possible contents, namely, the culture of the dominant

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classes. Prior to entry to schools, and continuing thereafter, the dominant classes learn other cultural contents in their families (e.g., museum going, consumption habits, language patterns, demeanor, etc.); these are reinforced in schools, resulting in an evolving cultural "habitus."8 The ''arbitrary power" that is most responsible for imposing educational culture on both dominant and subordinate classes consists of teachers and administrators of schools. These actors, themselves products of schools, fail to see the essential function of education as class reproduction. Hence, the reproductive function of educational system is an autonomous, closed system that is virtually impossible to change. Based in the ideology of equal access and achievement through individual merit, the modern educational system and its unwitting actors misrepresent the actual class conflicts and, moreover, legitimate the class structure. The educational system

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objectifies cultural capital within a singular market where all seemingly have equal access. Johansson (1982) has pointed out that the logic of the explanation employed by Bourdieu and Passseron essentially is a functionalist argument in that the educational system is maintained by its own consequence, with the class structure comprised of social classes unknowingly perpetuating the educational system. The logical structure of the argument is diagramed in Figure 2.2. Historical forces produced modern educational practices (X). The actions of teachers and administrators un-

Figure 2.2 The Educational Reproduction of Social Cla

intentionally maintain the class structures of moder The class structure favors selection of educators fro classes (Z) while, at the same time, defining subord ures as individual failings, thereby masking the rep cess. Privileged class educators (Z) perpetuate educ (X) without knowing their selection for educational made possible through the class structure (Y). If thi rectly identified, social actors are unable to change tice or class-based domination.

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But what if it is not just educators who enact the ed What if some elements of the class structure attemp schools in their favor? Would all privileged classes case? Clearly not. What if some social classes attem the educators in ways that favored their positions? O ors themselves changed the educational system in w favor each social class? In the system that Bourdieu (1970) have devised, we struggle to understand how above can happen, yet real educational and econom to be profoundly influenced by just these sorts of ac educational systems nor class structures are as stati Passeron pretend.

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Bourdieu and Passeron have done well to show that system is not a mere reflection of the economic and of society, but we must question the assumption tha systems are unchanging (or, at least, change only in class reproductive systems) and also the notion that cational systems are alike. If the authors had traced velopments of several educational systems, they wo that not only are there several paths to modernity, b educational systems differ. Class structures also var of the United States, this is partly because of the de peculiar higher educational system. To abstract from ation merely that education is re-

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lated to "class" reproduction is to miss other worthwhile, if less ominous, opportunities to generalize about education-based inequalities. Bowles and Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America

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Probably the best-known Marxian analysis of U.S. education was written by Bowles and Gintis (1976). Unfortunately, the section in this work about higher education is extremely cursory; most of the book is about primary and secondary education. Bowles and Gintis argue that U.S. education has gone through several major transformations, each corresponding to the authority relations of the workplace in a given era. In each case, the authors argue (with Braverman, 1974) that the educational system has been coopted by capitalists in order to subordinate previously autonomous artisan workers to the modern wage-labor system. Mass public education began in the 1840s and 1850s as a capitalist-inspired effort to socialize workers to the hierarchy of factory labor systems. Bowles and Gintis (1976:199) argue that the progressive education movement from 1890 to 1930 was spurred by corporate capitalism and its "rationalization of the process of reproducing the social

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classes of modern industrial life." The decentralized common school was not well-suited to the control needs of corporate capitalism, hence the high school emerged as a solution to the educational "contradiction" of capitalist development. One would expect to find considerable treatment of higher education from Bowles and Gintis, as college degree holders occupy an everwidening range of positions in twentieth-century America. Instead, readers receive a scant 20-page overview of higher education and "whitecollar proletarianization." Most of Bowles and Gintis' study deals with primary and secondary education. Although constant reference is made to the "educational system," we learn little about how the various components of this system historically became interrelated. 9 With regard to higher education, Bowles and Gintis (1976:205) see a pattern that began manifesting itself after 1950:

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Along with the virtual demise of the self-employed worker and the integration of white-collar labor into fragmented and hierarchical work roles, the expansion of corporate capital has brought the rapid growth of new kinds of work. . . . The expansion and indeed overexpansion of college enrollments has been, in part, a response to the needs generated by this changing occupational structure.

The 4-year college model of elite higher education has been augmented by the community college in order to accommodate the needs within

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advanced capitalism for trained lower- and middle-level technicians and office workers. 10 It is at this point that "higher education has been integrated into the wage-labor system" (Bowles & Gintis, 1976:202). Autonomous professionals such as solo-practice lawyers and doctors and highly skilled white-collar workers, who once were insulated from bureaucratic authority by their expertise, will begin to follow in the paths that skilled craftsmen took at the turn of the century; they will become subordinated to the bureaucratic hierarchies of capitalist organizations.

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Capitalist owners attempt, on the one hand, to "deskill" workers' positions through mechanization and standardization and, on the other hand, to fragment occupational groups by forcing the specialization of their members into numerous smaller work groups. Bowles and Gintis have a problem here; if standardization and production of expertise were crucial to the original procurement of worker autonomy in these occupations, how can they now claim the same forces work to the disadvantage of workers and are, in fact, encouraged by capitalists? The alternative hypothesis, that relatively disprivileged wings of occupational groups themselves sponsor standardization and specialization in order to monopolize and increase various rewards associated with their jobs, is not even considered by Bowles and Gintis.

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I admit that the capitalist ploy suggested by Bowles and Gintis is a plausible one, considering the objective interests of capitalists. But it is necessary to see under what circumstances this strategy was successful, and where it failed. One might, for example, ask why this process subordinated high school teachers and not college teachers. The likely answer from Bowles and Gintis for this and similar questions is that the exceptional group will in time capitulate as well, but this assumption is only a substitution of evolutionist theory for empirical analysis of history. Bowles and Gintis' focus on the grand historical forces that allowed capitalist exploitation of new types of workers renders all contrary evidence trivial. Randall Collins' The Credential Society: Was Multi-Ethnic Conflict Crucial?

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American scholars probably are most familiar with the subject of the rise of credentialism through the work of Randall Collins (1971; 1975; 1979; 1981a; 1988).11 Collins' work was a deliberate attempt to explain educational expansion and credentialism from a neo-Weberian perspective.12 There are two senses in which Collins' inquiries may be viewed as Weberian: his perspective is historical-developmental and he views edu-

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cation as a cultural market that exhibits considerable autonomy from the economy. In his study of the American educational system (1979), the analysis is very much an historical-developmental narrative that tells the reader "how we got where we are."

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The formal structure of Collins' argument is reminiscent of Weber in his analysis of the development of western capitalism. Weber worked within a framework of levels of causation, including social structural and ideal (cultural) levels, together with a series of historical preconditions that were met prior to the fruition of rational capitalism. There are several "fateful" circumstances that, at crucial historical junctures, pushed school-job linkages in particular directions in which they might not have gone had various factors not been present at specific times. The laissezfaire policies of the American state regarding higher education, sectarian competition in college founding, the role of accreditation associations in establishing a systematic educational sequence during the 1890s, ideologies of curricular reform, the distribution of wealth, and professional mobilizations after 1870 are all dealt with as circumstances in the growth of U.S. credentialism.

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The historical perspective that Collins takes is commendable; the present study attempts to do much the same in the way of outlining the idiographic circumstances that enabled pervasive credential ties to grow in the United States. Unfortunately, Collins did not provide sufficient empirical support for some rather critical claims. For example, Collins (1981a:206207) has identified the decade from 1850 to 1860 as one of enrollment crisis at U.S. universities, even though this was actually a period of substantial enrollment growth (cf. Table 1.3, which indicates for this decade an overall enrollment increase of 75.1% and a 67.2% enrollment increase at liberal arts colleges). For Collins, institutional failures, another proposed symptom of crisis, continuously occurred between 1800 and 1870. We find no analysis of variation here, let alone a discussion of rates of foundings and failures. 13 The fact is that the rate of new foundings and failures fluctuated. Both Tewksberry (1932:16,

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2325) and Burke (Table 1.4) indicate that the 1830s and the 1850s were relative boom periods in terms of college founding, whereas the 1840s (likely the late 1830s also) was a period of slowed founding activities coupled with high rates of college mortality. If there were enrollment crises in U.S. higher education, they appear to have occurred in the 1840s and the 1880s when the rate of decennial enrollment growth slowed to 35.4% and 22.9%, respectively (cf. Table 8).14 The slowed enrollment growth of the 1840s likely was due to fewer college foundings in this period, whereas mean enrollment growth changed from 58.4% in the 1870s to 10% in the 1880s. I discuss the significance of slowed enrollment

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growth in Chapters 6 and 7; for now, I would suggest merely that the timing and nature of higher educational "crises" in Collins' work need more attention.

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Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in Collins treatment of credentialism is a discussion of historical relations between the recruitment processes of bureaucratic organizations and higher education. Aside from a brief presentation of the results of a 1967 survey of hiring practices of California businesses (Collins, 1979:3148), there is little to indicate that Collins saw the business connection to higher education as an important one in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. 15 Interestingly, Collins (1979:33) does indicate that "public trust" organizations (e.g., financial, governmental, public transportation, utilities, etc.) typically have employees with higher credentials than "market" organizations (e.g., mining, manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, etc.). Just like the established professions, public trust organizations seek employees who adhere to and project a service ideal to their clientele. Following Etzioni (1975), Collins also argues that

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white-collar and managerial positions in organizations that require greater ''normative" (as opposed to "coercive" or "remunerative") controls over employees tend to use educational degrees as criteria for assessing employee loyalty.16 Despite the fact that Collins never seriously examines the potential historical effects of organizational decentralization on internal organizational needs for trustworthy employees, the relationship of "trust" to various types of organizations is intriguing; I shall address this issue in greater detail in Chapter 3.

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Most of Collins' discussions of occupational destinations of college degree holders deal with professional monopolies. Indeed, this is where his argument is most persuasive because he treats the historical details involved with the creation of professional credentials, particularly in law, medicine, and engineering (the latter is his negative case of weak professionalization). The notion of "cultural markets" and their interpenetrations with economic markets is central to Collins' thesis. Out of the many exchanges of cultural resources (formal knowledge, knowhow, language idioms, dress, demeanor, etc.) that occur in conversations, workplaces, schools, and so on, myriad cultural communities ("status groups," in Weber's terminology) develop. Some of these cultural groups gather and recognize fellow members only infrequently, some more often; some are very local in membership, others engage in cultural exchanges over great distances. College education and

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organized religion are examples of the deliberate or formal production of culture that frequently has allowed long-range cultural exchanges. Many other indigenous forms of culture production arise, mainly in local contexts, out of interactions in every-

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day life. The significance of formal production of modern (post-1890) higher educational culture is that, with its "universal" scientific basis, higher educational culture may be exchanged across much larger marketsit is general and abstract, thus enabling extensive application across groups. A major stumbling block in Collins' analysis is the pivotal role of multi-ethnic conflict in fueling educational growth. It is Collins' contention that cultural currencies overlap both with one another and with economic control (and he is correct, at least insofar as we regard this as an objectively possible situation). Collins (1979:94103; 1988:178) rightly stresses that "class" conflict in the United States has been significantly overlapped by ethnic and racial categories.

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Collins claims that the expansion of higher education was caused largely by the efforts of ethnic groups that competed for occupational positions:
[E]ducational credentials first became formal requirements for advancement of students within the sequence of schools. At first, then, degrees, like grades and test scores today, had no directly negotiable value in the occupational realm but did determine one's movement to a higher level of schooling. The advanced school levels then began to take on occupational significance in particular professions as these obtained state-licensed monopolies incorporating credential requirements. . . . The major impetus for this whole development . . . was the severe multiethnic conflicts of American society after the mid-nineteenth century (Collins, 1979:129).

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The dominant Anglo-Protestant minority attempted to secure various positions through the creation of educational barriers to employment in rewarding jobs. Newer ethnic groups such as the Germans and Scandinavians and, to a lesser extent, the Irish, attempted to establish their own schools (including common schools, academies, colleges, and professional schools) and thereby to secure positions for their children, particularly in urban-professional ethnic enclaves. Eventually, Collins argues, the Anglo-Protestants and their standardized pedagogy won out; the ethnic schools were closed down or transformed into Anglo schools and most ethnics were forced to participate in the culture of a school system that, although it espoused universal access and unbiased evaluation, favored Anglo-Protestants.

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It is true that the overall picture of U.S. social stratification after the 1840s cannot fully be understood without consideration of the ethnic division of labor. Among the first things that strikes analysts of nineteenth-century American history are the sheer numbers and proportions of immigrants in the U.S. population (e.g., 14.7% were foreign born

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in 1890; the percentage of second-generation immigrants would be even higher) and the tremendous ethnic cleavages that existed in major societal institutions. 17 There can be little doubt that the expansion of the common schools and, to a lesser extent, the growth of public high schools were influenced partly by the desires of dominant Anglo groups to teach immigrant children compliant citizenship values in the former case and to subordinate immigrants to industrial discipline in the latter. Collins (1979:93) notes:
the United States underwent a period of the most massive and diverse ethnic immigration in the history of the world. In this situation of political and geographical decentralization, this multiethnic society generated a tremendous struggle for cultural hegemony, which was fought out especially by building a massive educational system.

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Conflicts over instructional languages in public elementary and secondary schools were very widespread in the late nineteenth century, but these controversies rarely surfaced in colleges.18

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Anglos were rather insulated from some ethnic groups because colleges and their affiliated, homogenous, Anglo-Protestant academies largely were separate from the more ethnically diverse common schools and high schools up until the late 1890s; ethnic controversies did not tend to spread to higher education. Also, in the upper reaches of the labor market, some ethnic groups almost were absent at this point in time; Anglo-Protestant control was pervasive first over the Irish and later over eastern and southern European groups. For various newcomer and second-generation immigrant groups, the clergy, teaching, journalism, engineering, architecture, clerical work, and government officialdom were important regions of middle- to upper-level employment. These were positions that either served ethnic communities, required specific technical skills, or were objects of electoral politics. In addition, small, solidary immigrant groups tended to do well in enterprises that, by

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the very nature of the work involved, required bosses to impart significant degrees of "trust" to subordinates in transacting various credit, investment, and commercial exchanges (Stinchcombe, 1986a:258). The reason for ethnic success in such areas partly was that strong ethnic identification itself provided a basis for the trusting relationships between employers and employees. One might surmise that solidary ethnic groups least needed higher educational status group fabrications because they already had workable in-group recruitment strategies.19 On the other hand, some ethnic groups appear to have suffered little from "Anglo domination." Within Anglo colleges, Germans and Scandi-

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navians probably were the earliest well-represented immigrant groups, in terms of both students and faculty. 20 Germans and Scandinavians early on appear to have fared reasonably well in securing rewarding jobs, even if not as well as their Anglo competitors. Interestingly, it also was the Germans and Scandinavians that were the most active among ethnic groups in founding their own colleges; despite their large numbers, Irish Catholics established very few colleges prior to 1900. Likewise, the ethnic groups from the post-1890, newer immigration established relatively few colleges, probably due to the consolidation of higher education that occurred shortly after they arrived. By the early twentieth century, the Irish also were likely to have found their way into the credential market. Labaree (1988:15960) found that among the graduates of the class of 1900 at Philadelphia's prestigious Central High School, the sons of German immigrants were more likely to attend

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college (75%) than the sons of those who were born in America (63%). In the same class of graduates, Germans (50%) and Russian Jews (62%) were more likely to enter the professions than those who were American born (35%). Later in the twentieth century, groups such as the Irish, Jews, and some Asians would come to hold greater educational credentials than AngloProtestants.

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In these alternately assimilationist or insulated situations, where was there room for educational conflict? Where was the ethnic "threat" to higher positions held by Anglos? Collins (1979:13159) suggests that Anglo professionals were interested in ethnic-held markets for professional services, but even given this fact, we do not know why higher education continued to expand after such ethnic markets were overtaken by Anglo practitioners. If ethnics were recognizable by other means (language, dress, demeanor, etc.), why would Anglos devise a massive educational system just to exclude immigrants? It would seem plausible that various ethnic groups in fact favored higher educational expansion as a means of removing group-based occupational hiring and promotion discrimination and replacing this with formal evaluation criteria such as degrees and credit hours of course work. Indeed, the late twentieth-century history of higher education indicates that

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subordinate ethnic groups favor increased educational provision and are only marginally concerned with the discriminatory contents of schooling. Perhaps these groups really know what they are doing; maybe they are not being duped by a singular group which controls the higher educational system and its culturally biased contents. Rather than merely surmise that ethnic conflict produces higher educational expansion, consider under what circumstances ethnic conflict is likely to become most pronounced. Collins does not really cite many actual cases of college credential-related conflict, nor does he outline

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the parameters of ethnic competition. Bonacich (1972) provides some clues as to where we should expect to find ethnic conflicts. According to Bonacich, labor market competition is indeed a central determinant of ethnic struggles, but the sheer level of inequality that exists is not a good predictor of where conflicts will arise. Rather, it is in circumstances where two or more ethnic groups compete for the same positions that the most severe ethnic contestation occurs. In the United States and elsewhere, ethnic struggle usually has been between lower-strata groups and often between newer and older immigrants, both of which often were recruited by capitalists who sought cheaper labor. The typical ethnic struggle, then, does not concern professional groups or managers, even though these conflicts happen; usually, ethnic battles involve workingclass positions that have little or no relationship to educational credentialing. 21 In the United States, previously subordinate ethnic groups

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that, by various means external to higher education, have secured powers vis--vis the dominant groups, have found specific strata of the higher educational system relatively open. Although there are notable exceptions, most labor markets that recruit college graduates from this system typically have been more concerned with the prospective candidates' membership in a stratified educational group than in an ethnic group. It is the probable stratification of the educational system along ethnic lines that in some small measure drives educational expansion, but we should realize that this argument implies competition between relatively equal subordinate groups, rather than an all-out competition between all ethnic groups in a society.

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In sum, with the notable exceptions of a few professional practices and hiring in some public bureaucracies, it remains uncertain if ethnicity was a prime factor in occupational competition for degree-related jobs and, related to this, a major force in producing higher educational expansion. It seems likely varied employer recruitment interests are the criteria on which ethnic conflicts in colleges may build. Certainly, it is advisable to separate the notion of general Anglo cultural imposition from the far more differentiated occupational cultures either imposed on college students (e.g., obedience to bureaucratic authority) or held by them (e.g. professional cultures). Perhaps it is more useful to view ethnic conflict as a determinant of working-class stratification, because this was the sector of the workforce in which natives and immigrants were relative equals. The most useful application of the theory of multi-ethnic conflict might be aimed at the common schools and vocational high

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schools, but even at these levels the implications of ethnically induced expansion for college enrollments and credentialing are unclear. A thorough analysis of the recruitment patterns of U.S. colleges is unavailable, but limited

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evidence suggests that colleges recruited mainly from the more prestigious high schoolsthose high schools with the highest proportions of Anglo-Protestant and well-assimilated "ethnic" students (Labaree, 1988). Margaret Archer's Sociology of Educational Expansion

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Out of their research on European education (especially in France, Germany, Britain, Russia, and Denmark), a group of scholars led by Margaret Archer have argued for a theory of growth of educational systems that avoids some of the pitfalls of the theories of educational expansion we just discussed (e.g., the absence of agency, monocausal mechanisms, and the tendency of some theorists to look at educational institutions apart from their external environments). 22 Thus, the Archer group, in an explicit attempt to theorize within a multidimensional Weberian framework that links micro- and macrosocietal forces ("structure and agency"), stresses (1) the varying influences of primary (students and parents) and corporate actors (the teaching profession, centralized educational control organizations, and external interest groups) in activities instrumental to educational change; (2) the role of ideology in educational domination and challenge; and (3) the degree of interaction between

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the education, the state, and the economy. Archer's (1979; 1982) own work forms the nucleus of this project and her analysis benefits from attention to a variety of human interests enacting educational change. These causal agents are confined in their actions to two seemingly intractable phases of expansion, plus a third phase wherein human agency is usurped by an autonomous educational system.

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Archer (1979; 1982) outlined two typical patterns of overall educational expansion. The first is one in which growth in the take-off phase is a consequence of a violent overthrow and "replacement" of exclusive, traditional educational domination by elites, followed by relatively steady growth of a highly centralized state educational system. The second model of expansion entails a growth pattern that moves from traditional domination to the "substitution" of new schools, which may be loosely affiliated in plural networks of schools (as, for instance, in nineteenth-century denominational education in the United Statesthis is my example, not Archer's) and concludes with the incorporation of these plural networks in a decentralized state educational system. The type of historical transition from traditional educational domination to state systems of education thus shapes subsequent educational change within state educational systems. Within the centralized system

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that results from replacement, interaction between internal educational actors

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(e.g., teachers, administrators, and students) and external educational interest groups is minimal; the efforts of each group to effect educational changes is channeled through the political manipulation of state-governing elites. In the centralized system, only the state may act autonomously in creating educational change. The "permeability" of the political center by external demands for educational change (the responsiveness of state educational elites) also varies with respect to time and nation. In decentralized educational systems that emerge out of substitution, all the forms of interaction present in centralized systems remain, but internal educational actors and external interest groups also are able directly to influence educational change and to interact with one another in shaping the educational system.

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In the take-off phase, Archer argues that primary actors are relatively unimportant to growth, because they behave "atomistically" in responding to the new educational provisions created by competing corporate educational entrepreneurs. In the growth phase, primary actors unwittingly begin to influence educational policies through their aggregate responses to educational provision. Corporate actors remain expansion oriented at this point, but their actions begin to take into consideration the decisions of primary actors. Finally, a phase of educational inflation and, in the case of decentralized growth, "incorporation" of plural educational networks results in state systems of education. Primary actors at this stage know a great deal more about the advantages of education and begin to interact with other primary actors along class, ethnic, and gender lines in attempts to win greater educational privileges and to limit the educational benefits of other groups. In the

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inflationary period, corporate actors pursue separate interests that, again unwittingly, produce expansion. Controlling organizations are able to incorporate plural educational networks at this phase, but their attempts at rationalization and regulation of growth of the educational system by coercive means are unsuccessful due to the independent, inflation-producing actions of other actors. The teaching profession is better organized at this juncture and initiates self-interested educational growth and change without negotiating with other groups. External interest groups remain as the only remaining corporate actors that attempt to ''negotiate" with other corporate actors in order to achieve educational changes that favor their interests.

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The case of U.S. higher educational expansion appears best to conform to Archer's model of expansion by the decentralized pattern consisting of "substitution," "plural networks," and "incorporation," although I shall express reservations about the overall fit of this pattern to the case of the United States in what follows. What is somewhat bewildering

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is that Archer never seriously dealt with the case of U.S. higher educational expansion, which, after all, was the first and most dramatic example of mass higher education. Moreover, it is possible early U.S. higher educational expansion provided a model for the expansion of other higher educational systems in the twentieth century, although I cannot substantiate this point in the present study. I can only speculate that Archer sees the case of the United States as idiosyncratic, because it is inconceivable that she is unaware of the tremendous differences between U.S. and European higher educational expansion.

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A major shortcoming of Archer's work is that "external interest groups" such as labor market groups are merely alluded to as theoretically relevant forces, rather than empirically demonstrated. By contrast, the teaching profession and educational administrators are discussed in great detail. Surely changes in the recruitment patterns of the higher civil service and the professions must have had a significant influence on the expansion of national systems of education in Archer's western European cases, but we learn next to nothing about the specific mechanisms stemming from these changes and how these forces influenced schools. We are forced to conclude that Archer sees such "external interest groups" merely "reacting" to opportunities (again, of what sort we are uncertain) created by internal educational actors. Perhaps Archer thinks that her main problematic of explaining the development of national systems of education excuses her from serious reflection on labor

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market influences on schools, but it is doubtful that large-scale higher educational expansion may occur where corresponding labor market "needs" fail to expand. As Collins (1981a) rightly argues, both the expansion and the contraction of higher educational institutions are associated with rises and falls in the occupational credentialing values of the "cultural currency'' provided by colleges.

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Despite her explicit attempts to avoid overtones of the necessary development of educational systems, one should be suspicious of generalizations that utilize the conceptual imagery of "phases." Although Archer is careful to warn that different societies go through the three phases of expansion at different times, it still is not clear that all societies go through the same phases. The most conspicuous exception would be cases in which an entrenched traditional educational domination never existed (e.g., the United States) or in which overthrow of the traditional educational elite did not happen (again, in the United States, where the transition to democratic education was not violent or even controversial because colonial colleges readily accepted poor students once these students sought admission). Perhaps the most alarming claim Archer makes in her work is that

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modern educational systems have become separated from human interests. 23 Archer (1982:43) writes of the final phase of educational development:

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In short, with its vast increase in size and scope the system does take on a life of its own, but because this represents the resolution of a parallelogram of corporate and primary pressures, the result is not something that anybody wants. This constitutes the most important contrast with the previous periods: in Phase I, the corporate ownership groups gained much of what they wanted (and only primary actors who saw advantages in it underwent education)in Phase II the positive reinforcement of supply and demand was positively advantageous to the majority of corporate and primary actors alike. The contemporary Phase is distinctive since, with the partial exception of the profession itself, it has few solid beneficiaries and little unmitigated support. This more than anything else witnesses to the system having a life of its ownproduced by human interaction but escaping its control in Frankenstein fashion.

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The idea that expansive education is something "nobody wanted" (i.e., is the unintended consequence of multiple historical actions) is believable; the assertion of system autonomy in the modern phase is rather mystifying. Considering the case of U.S. education (or most other educational systems, for that matter), educational critics surely are present, but it is hard to ignore the near religious enthusiasm for "more" education among the general public. Even if one accepted Archer's point that no one wants an expansive educational system, this would not imply that the system operates autonomously from human interests.24 It is obvious that every occupational group that possesses an educational monopoly over its positions benefits from education, and it is quite likely many of these groups are conscious of the benefits education gains them (and these groups are not limited to educators themselves as Archer claims, although educational professionals clearly play a crucial

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role). Archer's judgement about the value of education may reveal her actual disgust for inflationary educational systems, but this disposition does little to inform us of the interests that maintain expansion. Conclusion To summarize the basic problems and contributions encountered in the five theories discussed above, the notion of formally taught job skills was central to both the functionalist and human capital theories of educational expansion, although I have argued it is important to challenge the

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naive idea of higher education simply as a provider of the specific technical skills required for the performance of jobs. In the next chapter, I introduce a more useful concept of schooltaught skill, which focuses on communications skills as these apply to job performance and to worker control.

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Marxian theories of educational expansion generally have failed to demonstrate agency in their arguments that a ruling class always has manipulated the higher educational system to its own advantage. Although one readily can see particular social groups win and lose in higher education and in the labor market, it is not clear these outcomes strictly are results of actions related to social class. Credentialing, to be sure, produces inequalities of myriad sorts, but it appears that these inequalities are more complex and more dynamic than typical Marxian theories predict. Some Marxian theory suggests that there is a source of centralized control of higher education (the great philanthropic organizations founded in the early twentieth century), but it is doubtful that even these organizations solely represented class interests.

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Although the idea of multi-ethnic conflict as the ultimate driving force of educational expansion is untenable, Collins has identified crucial roles of decentralized higher educational control in launching colleges (although the association between decentralized control and the economic interests of land speculators receives scant attention in Collins work; I cover this issue in Chapter 5), educational system building, and alliances of higher education to the professions in producing credentialism. I elaborate on these themes in the chapters that follow. Additionally, I shall examine a general mechanism (reduction of recruitment uncertainty) that ties higher education to both professional and bureaucratic labor-market recruitment.

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Finally, in Archer's work I found a theory that, in the end, was just too Eurocentric to account for the case of the United States. The degree of decentralized control in the United States is much greater than in any European case, so much so as to make the "decentralized" control in Europe seem quite centralized from the perspective of the United States. It is unfortunate that Archer did not seriously address the problem of educational/occupational affiliations, for this would have been a worthwhile contribution to the comparative sociology of higher educational expansion. Instead, Archer concentrates on internal educational actors and, quite advisedly, the interaction between education and the centralized state and church. Despite these problems, Archer has identified a critical component of educational expansion of originally decentralized institutions, namely, that consolidation of plural systems of education is

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prerequisite to the growth of mass state systems of education.

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3 A Theory of Educational Credentialism

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The following framework for analysis of the vast higher educational expansion that occurred in the United States over the last two centuries serves as a guide to the more detailed empirical analyses in the chapters that follow. It is useful to conceptualize educational expansion in terms of a contingent chain of historical causal forces. My argument is that changing employee performance and control uncertainties are important determinants of linkages between higher education and labor market recruitment, but that these ties themselves are dependent on prior conditions that allow schools to be of sufficient size and pedagogical content to make them attractive to students and to render them plausible recruitment grounds for specific employers. The structure of the argument I shall elaborate is summarized in Figure 3.1. The first part of my discussion will outline the "enabling conditions" under which educational expansion may occur; the second part will analyze the labor market

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recruitment factors that encourage ties between higher education and employment.

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Among the enabling conditions for expansion, the first is the presence of sufficient wealth, distributed among a large proportion of the population, to make possible the rather "wasteful" activity of formal cultural production (including education). The second condition is suitable collective belief systems ("traditions" or "ideologies") that orient group actions and resources toward educational growth and credentialism at various points in the process of educational expansion, including the early period when growth in the number of colleges (rather than enrollment growth) occurs. The third condition is the decentralized control of educational institutions required to allow groups with sufficient wealth and favorable ideological disposition actually to invest in higher education. This decentralization is especially important in the early school founding period. Ironically, the same decentralization that favors expansion in the early period becomes a hindrance to sustained growth in later

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years. Once students enroll in larger numbers and educational credentialbased labor market ties begin to form, destructive

Figure 3.1 Structure and Agency in Historical Credentiali

credentialing competition between schools become threat to long-term educational expansion. Legitima credentialing power also is challenged by employer perceptions of contradictions in the content of scho some degree of centralization of control standardiza agogy helps avert a legitimation crisis and favors fu sion. Stratification of both institutional prestige and linkages accompanies this development.

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The second, larger part of this chapter discusses the conditions that favor recruitment from higher educa tions. Here again, the idea of fortuitous timing of ca producing educational expansion is important. If, at period of labor market change, higher education eit tensive enough or does not impart consistent and su "character" to students, it is unlikely that extensive tional credentialing will arise; under such circumsta tional groups may develop alternative means of rec examinations, apprenticeships, or recruitment from various noneducational status groups) that tend to p time for as long as they accomplish the same recrui

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The formal distinction between "professional" and positions is the first topic covered. Formal educatio ten were associated with work in the traditional pro reason for this fact and for the use of higher educati in newer professions is that such degrees guarantee levels of skill, compliance, and public demeanor in practitioners to make them safe bets not to threaten powers based in the solidarity of members. Guarant and employee compliance also are important to hier

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archically organized bureaucratic workplaces, but in bureaucratic contexts, supervisors rather than workers control the recruitment process. In bureaucracies, education-based recruitment stresses conformity, but the variability of such organizations is greater than that of professional organizations, so this difference makes such recruitment more problematic. Furthermore, employee competitiveness may be a virtue in bureaucracies (i.e., in employee interactions with other firms), whereas this trait seldom is needed in monopolistic "communities" of professionals.

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The concept of formally learned skill is my next topic. In contrast to popular conceptions of educationally induced skill as expertise in the technical manipulation of things, I introduce the centrality of language skills as competencies employers secure in higher educational graduates. Formal language serves different functions in professional and bureaucratic organizations. Facility with formal writing and oral discourse, for example, is important in both work contexts. However, professionals need to know esoteric languages because it is an important basis for their positional monopolies, whereas bureaucrats merely need to transact business over time and space. Thus, language has not only a technical function in labor markets, but also a solidarity-building function.

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Issues regarding skills, labor market organization, and employee control are brought together in the final part of the chapter where the concept of "uncertainty" is introduced as a useful way to interpret increasing recruitment of college graduates. In professional and bureaucratic labor markets, there are positions within organizations that have high degrees of uncertainty embedded in them. The degree of uncertainty in given labor markets or in entire economies varies over time (in modern industrial societies, positional uncertainty generally has increased, but the degree of formal educational credentialism is not perfectly correlated with the degree of labor market uncertainty, as credentialism is but one possible means of reducing the uncertainties). Some positions require incumbents who can deal effectively with various types of technical uncertainty. The very ability of actors to deal with technical uncertainties introduces another problemthey gain sufficient powers due to their

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abilities, which, if left unchecked, easily could result in actions detrimental to organizations. Control of positions also may be problematic in situations where functional or geographic distance from authorities grants employees considerable autonomy. In these circumstances, college graduates often are recruited, either because they seem to have requisite skills or because superiors believe that they can be trusted to act in organizational interests due to their educationally induced morals.

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Formation of an Institutional Base Distribution of Wealth and Formal Culture Production A basic predictor of the level of formal culture (i.e., culture created by a permanent, specialized staff) produced by a society is the extent to which a society exceeds the provision of material subsistence for its members. 1 The reason for this correlation, of course, is that groups must expend valuable resources in formal culture production and, where subsistence is threatened, most groups opt to use their resources for material benefit.

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Beyond the mere presence of wealth in a society, the distribution of wealth among members is an important determinant of formal culture production. The more equally wealth is distributed among economic and political groups, and the more these groups compete with one another for various market advantages, the greater the likelihood of the expansion of formal culture production as a means of gaining status privileges (that buttress economic and political powers). This principle also applies to subjective perceptions about economic and political mobility of groups; where expectations of mobility are high (either from actual material improvement or from ideologically induced "hope"), participation in formal culture production on the part of those groups that view themselves as upwardly mobile typically increases. In this case, the formality of culture often is tied to its ideological presentation by controlling cultural groups as "universally accessible" and

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"democratically controlled." Both circumstances concern wealth; the main difference is one between formal culture as a means of maintaining power and formal culture as a means (frequently ill conceived) of gaining power. Educational Control

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Closely related to the distribution of societal wealth and the disposition of groups to channel such wealth into formal education is another facilitating condition for higher educational expansionabsence, or at least diminishment, of centralized elite control of formal education. Centralized control vs. decentralized control of education has been crucial during the take-off phases of educational expansions and, depending on the origins of control, has shaped subsequent educational expansions (Archer, 1979). Historical forms of centralized control have rested alternatively in the bureaucratically organized church and state, but even shifting educational control between these two organizations has resulted in limited changes in elite control of higher education. "Democra-

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tization" of centralized elite educational systems often was limited to lower levels of education, leaving elite higher education intact as a consequence of the terminal character of lowerlevel education. One would expect that democratic, centralized educational systems only expand in higher education once some form of "substitution" of alternative schools, to borrow Archer's (1979) terminology, occurs in higher education, and once these competitor institutions gain extensive credentialing powers. 2 In the absence of centralized educational control, it is possible for an educational system to become "top heavy," with a proliferation of higher educational institutions created by competing groups. In this situation, the educational system is forced to "grow roots" at lower levels (especially at the secondary education level) in order to provide a steady supply of students to colleges and universities. Where decentralized educational control is matched by decentralized,

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education-based state occupational licensure, both educational and labor market actors are left free to pursue beneficial exchanges of services. Short-term jumps in higher educational enrollments may result from a number of causes both internal and external to schools. However, lasting expansion of credentialism depends on the existence of adequate numbers of schools and sufficiently motivated students at crucial historical junctures where labor market recruiters need candidates with particular attributes, both technical and cultural, which they cannot easily find elsewhere. Expansion of higher education could follow logically from the efforts of schools to provide candidates for unchanging employer needs (e.g., where a former source of recruitment fails) but, empirically, large enrollment expansions have been mainly the result of qualitative changes in labor market needs, coupled with student and educational institution responses to such external changes.

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All this free play in educational entrepreneurship allows a great proliferation of higher educational institutions in the early period of educational expansion. Early growth also makes possible labor market connections in later periods, but an ironic consequence of early decentralization was that, left unabated, it eventually engendered a failure of credentialism. Some degree of centralized control of higher education is needed for continued growth (i.e., at the point where extensive labor market linkages become possible). To expand the educational system, limitation of competition between schools and school systems is required in order to save these schools from shrinking student recruitment bases and subsequent crises. Efficient, standardized processing of students through a stratified educational system (including higher education) allows multiple institutions to survive, rather than the market competition and consolidation

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of the educational system in elite institutions. Limited

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centralized control of educational institutions also enhances labor market connections through coerced standardization of educational contentsthis development includes appeasement of labor market desires for particular attributes in recruits and creation of public perceptions of the legitimacy of standardized (not contradictory) educational qualifications of incumbents of "expert" offices.

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Finally, forces working against educational expansion differ according to the origins of higher educational control. In originally decentralized higher education, the problem is merely one of limiting the process of credentialism so it is not self-defeating; in originally centralized higher education, new credentialing relationships must be forged against more entrenched interests in other bases of recruitment and promotion (e.g., kin and ethnic groups). Decentralized higher education, though historically a product of centralized educational traditions, becomes a separate "tradition" of expansion when new occupational groups recognize the successes of previous occupational groups in using educational credentials and reason that it is worthwhile to pursue similar means of labor market control. Tradition Discriminates Among Alternative Actions

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Even distribution of wealth among objectively or subjectively "equal" competitors does not guarantee high levels of formal culture production. A further favoring circumstance for educational expansion is a tradition of formal culture production as a means of securing domination and/or legitimacy among those groups most materially able to expend cultural resources, together with a successful transmission of this ideology to subordinate groups. 3 These traditions themselves are rooted in historical "interests," but sometimes traditions become independent forces. Collective beliefs not only favor particular actions, but also discourage alternative actions. The authority of tradition implies not only a tendency of power groups to employ past practices, but also a habituation of subordinate groups to accept these powers as legitimate. Traditions of formal-culture production (e.g., British and German higher education for the United States) are "models" of legitimate

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domination available to contemporary power groups (Ben-David, 1977). There may be considerable variability within a tradition of formal culture production regarding the exact type of culture that ought to be produced in order to legitimize a given power, for example, universitytaught knowledge, technical institutes, or shop cultures in engineering education (Calhoun, 1960; Calvert, 1967). Ideological support of early higher education expansion may come

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from many sources, such as the economic interests of school founders, the vested interests of school staff in perpetuation of jobs, the appeasement of students through reforms of educational experience, and the linkages of education to a host of status group interests (e.g., religious sects, ethnic and racial groups, community and regional schisms, or the legitimacy of higher civil service office holders and traditional statelicensed professionals). Although these ideological supports are helpful in launching educational expansion, they represent limited and sometimes fleeting motivations for higher educational growth. Periodic spurts of growth, failures, and contractions of higher educational institutions and systems frequently stem from attainment and subsequent loss of such limited supports. Ideological support of higher education must increase (spread to new groups) if sustained educational expansion is to occur. Promulgation, by a variety of interest groups, of

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democratic educational access and evaluation ideologies encourages continued educational expansion. Foremost among these interest groups are actors concerned with making educational degrees prerequisites to recruitment and advancement in labor markets. Once widespread labor markets themselves take an active interest in higher education as a means of securing competent employees and controlling members, educational expansion becomes more secure (except when the state or powerful private educational control organizations step in to stop credentialingthis circumstance becomes less likely as credential expansion proceeds, barring virtual economic or political collapse). 4 An Agency for the Production of Agents

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Again, creation of a vast educational structure out of a variety of structurally favorable circumstances and constellations of interests does not guarantee its longevity, even though educational actors with vested interests (e.g., early investors in a physical plant, paid school staff, and students who have spent time in schools) typically wish to keep their institutions alive and sometimes actually do prolong their existences. Formal higher education has never flourished as an end in itself; rather, sustained educational institutions have depended on lasting certification linkages to rewarding positions.5 Although colleges made certain adjustments to their internal structures that had little to do with labor markets (e.g., the provision of enhanced college social life in the form of athletics or fraternal organizations), they made other changes that were a direct response to changing labor-market conditions. Within the U.S.

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Page 55

labor market, two basic changes improved the placement chances of college graduates. First, new occupations emerged (and extant occupations were transformed) that required greater skill levels, particularly in communications skills, but also (and somewhat later) in technological skills such as those developed by various branches of engineering. Second, the structures of widespread professional practices and bureaucratic organizations changed in ways that demanded new modes of recruitment and control of members. Peculiar circumstances up to 1880 provided a precarious institutional structure for U.S. higher education. We now need to develop a theoretical framework that will enable us to explain the stable credentialing system that had attached itself to this institutional structure by the early twentieth century.

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My analysis does not intend to show how increasing participation in higher education enabled people to do more or less productive work of better or worse quality in various occupations. 6 Rather, I wish to know which historical circumstances and power maneuvers helped particular groups, namely, various sets of college graduates, increasingly to hold specific advantageous positions. Between 1890 and 1930 lucrative work in many expanding private and governmental bureaucracies increasingly became dominated by college graduates. Newer and older professional groups also increasingly relied on college recruitment and training over this period. Not all such positions were filled by college graduates, but college graduates concentrated heavily in these occupations rather than others such as proprietorships, mechanical engineering, farming, crafts, and so on. Why were college graduates concentrated in particular jobs? More specifically, what was it about both

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''professional" and "bureaucratic" positions that produced such a concentration? Persons with near identical training in their baccalaureate education entered rather dissimilar professional training at law and medical schools. The same types of B.A. degreeholding students often entered or rapidly were promoted to high-level positions within some bureaucratically organized workplaces. Thus, one should expect to find structural similarities between at least some sectors of professional and bureaucratic organizations. Professional and bureaucratic jobs for which college graduates are hired often entail high levels of uncertainty regarding the probability of the adequate performance of incumbents. College graduates often are hired to act as agents for organizations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an agent as:

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One who . . . acts or exerts power, as distinguished from the patient, and also from the instrument.

Page 56 One who does the actual work of anything, as distinguished from the instigator or employer; hence, one who acts for another, a deputy, steward, factor, substitute, representative, or emissary.

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As Stinchcombe (1986a) observed, agency relationships ("fiduciary exchanges") contrast with authority relationships in that the former are typical in work settings that involve high degrees of uncertainty about day-to-day employee activities, whereas the latter are common where activities are organized around routine ("continuous") production. The two relationships also vary in terms of the normatire structure of the employer-employee relationship. Whereas authority norms most apply to the lower levels of organizations and stress dutiful compliance with superiors' wills, fiduciary relations predominate at the top of organizational hierarchies, emphasizing norms of honor that facilitate control from a distance ("responsible" behavior and "disinterestedness''), together with structural policing mechanisms such as committee work (where "colleagues" police one another), mandatory public disclosures of work completed or planned, external auditing, and job

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security based on continuous, adequate performance.

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Either simple unwillingness to do a task or uncertainty about how it should be done may encourage agency relationships, but in both cases the control of powers delegated to agents by the employer are problematic. Hiring for such positions requires significant employer trust in the abilities or behavioral proclivities of recruits. But where does such trust come from; that is, how do employers become confident that organizational uncertainties will be dealt with satisfactorily? Procurement of such trust in numerically extensive recruitment efforts involves expenditure of costly organizational resources. In this circumstance, many organizations seek out what Shapiro (1987) has called "guardians of trust" or institutions that "produce" reliable agents. 7 Schools are one possible provider of such agents (religious groups and kin groups are other common institutionalized providers of agents), so we may view them in part as "agencies for the production of agents." Yet, as

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Shapiro (1987:64548) notes, there is a tendency for principals to distrust even guardians of trust, so users of agencies tend to encourage development of even more extensive overseeing agencies, which guarantee trustworthy performance (consider the role of business and professional communities in the establishment of U.S. higher educational control through accreditation agencies and philanthropic foundations), and so forth in an unending effort to eliminate simple trust in favor of more reliable controls over performance. Of course, many other traditional and modern occupations (charis-

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matically qualified "magicians" of all sorts, union workers, real estate salespeople, etc.) deal with uncertainties, yet are not dominated by college graduates. Part of the problem becomes one of finding historical circumstances and specific employer agency problems that encouraged filling particular types of jobs with individuals who claimed formally taught competencies and behavioral dispositions. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a consideration of the types of professional and bureaucratic labormarket recruitment problems that favor hiring college-educated individuals (i.e., where sufficient numbers of such individuals are present). I begin with a formal definition of the concepts of "professional" and "bureaucratic" work. The Typological Positions of "Profession" and "Bureaucracy"

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Thus far, I have referred to "profession" and "bureaucracy" as implicit categories of work. Sociological literature has been prone to misuse typological concepts such as "profession" and ''bureaucracy," so clarification of the meanings of each term as they will be used in the present context may be useful. Social types are constructs that summarize the values of two or more variables that, in empirical reality, often occur together in some causal manner. The use of type concepts serves as an analytical tool for analyzing empirical facts; we compare the attributes of given cases to ideal types in order to locate crucial attributes and processes along an imaginary continuum between our mental constructs. 8

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Unfortunately, much fruitless work has been done in the past by way of refuting social typologies with empirical evidence. This exercise makes little sensea typological concept is either useful or not, but we should not confuse such concepts with causal theories. A second pitfall has been a tendency to look for cases that absolutely correspond to a single typological concept (e.g., questioning whether terrazzo finishers or real estate salespeople really are professionals if they lack an explicit code of ethics). This practice not only misses the point about types being idealized constructs, but also fails to engage the crucial comparative exercise of locating cases along meaningful type-based continua. The concepts of "profession" and "bureaucracy" often have been abused because of such misunderstandings.

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What is needed is not merely a trait inventory (a set of empirically recurrent variables) for each, but rather an understanding of what forces nest these traits together. Why is a comparison of "profession" and "bureaucracy" useful for locating and talking about so many facts? The crucial differences between ideal-typical professional and bureaucratic organizations are summarized in Figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2 Professional and Bureaucratic Administration of Labor

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Collegial vs. Hierarchical Relations Between Workers. Profes ies of equals," whereas bureaucratic workers often have more of labor of organizations. This determines a fundamental diffe als do not directly compete as much as bureaucrats; instead, p stratification of bureaucratic positions tends to produce confli tion with similar organizations. By contrast, professionals see posers over nurses, or architects' control over contractors and Labor Markets vs. Intraorganizational Exclusion of Competit ileged positions and orderly promotions through various statu fessions maintain market control by influencing coercive pow accrediting organizations in their favor. Competing models of the threat or use of state-backed violence. The content of lega community. Bureaucratic work is an arena of competition bet Careers in professions promote solidarity by making internal justified by the requirements of expert training. In bureaucrac ganizationi.e., not across organizational positions of the entire Abstract vs. Concrete Products of Labor. Professionals produ significance of the abstract character of commodities professi what they have bought; products of bureaucratic labor are sub also possible for professionals to manipulate supply of their a labor are more easily produced, and overproduced, by compe Client-based vs. Organization-initiated Work. Professionals s vidual consumersi.e., without intermediaries such as the mark cratic labor. The significance of direct marketing of products demand, thus gaining them power over clients. Recruitment: Standardized Formal Training vs. Heterogenou

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and promotion processes, professionals monopolize "producti alization of formal schooling as a prerequisite to entry to prac Training in the knowledge prerequisite to occupational practic cers" are defined as incompetent or self-interested. Ideologica training (science) and universal educational access. The differ partly in the difference between universally accessible "scient monopolized training, Unlike professions, hiring and promoti by superordinate managers and personnel specialists. Importa qualifications, including heterogenous schooling, patronage, a testing).

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Many positions within bureaucratic workplaces approximate, on one or several of the above points, work in a "professional" context. Engineers, for example, are typically at some remove from the hierarchy of authority stretching from production managers to foremen to assembly line workers in mass production industries. Similarly, the lawyers in private industrial organizations may possess considerable autonomy in their work compared to the managers who are directly involved in the production process. Thus, we are not so much interested in types of workplaces (e.g., professional vs. bureaucratic) as in types of positions and control of recruitment and promotion in these jobs. Keeping in mind these basic differences between professional and bureaucratic work, we now take up sources of uncertainty in organizations as a crucial determinant of education-based recruitment. Recruitment uncertainties arise out of employers' perceptions of new members' abilities to

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accomplish tasks ("technical uncertainty") and out of employers' estimations of the likelihood that recruits actually will perform in the interests of organizational leaders ("control uncertainty''). A Specification of the Concept of Formally Taught Skill

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In Chapter 2, I argued that functional and human capital theories of credentialism failed to show exactly what types of skills colleges imparted to their graduates and how these skills were relevant to the workplaces that graduates entered. Some social class-based theories of higher educational domination likewise tend to imply a notion of education-induced skill solely as an ability to accomplish tasks through the manipulation of human or inanimate objects, rather than as a learned capacity to interact with relative equals through the medium of esoteric languages. 9 In what follows, I attempt to show how the skill of collegiate-level literacy was beneficial to professional and bureaucratic employers. In doing this, I am suggesting a corrective to the notion of skill as simple know-how.

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The solidarities of professional organizations are enhanced by the codification of procedures and proper public demeanor and by inscriptions in texts of the abstract knowledge that forms the ideological basis of professional practice. Ritual practices of magicians and healers originally were passed on through oral traditions; these practices were precursors to modern codified professional knowledge systems in the East and West. Knowledge of sacred texts was a basis for the monopolization of the priesthood. Likewise, at a later point in time, legal texts provided a foundation for monopolization of state and private legal practices. Written standards of practice allowed greater consistency of practice and

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allowed wider social and geographic spheres of professional organization (the subordination of "quasi-practitioners" to professional norms and domination of large territorial labor markets rather than localized ones). Oral traditions of learning favored professional development, but mainly within smaller geographical regions and within circumscribed social networks. Written knowledge bases for occupational practices (whether actually used in practice or merely fabricated for monopoly purposes) have been more favorable to the development of large formal educational institutions. These standards also enabled professional groups to seem more legitimate before their respective publics, because internal cleavages were no longer perceptible ("agreement" signified legitimacy of practices).

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Written standards also facilitated the abstraction of professional knowledge bases. The very obscurity and practical irrelevance of such texts helped create occupational monopolies, because interpretation of the meanings of scriptures, codified laws, and the like was possible only among the members of professional communities. Of course, persuading the various publics to believe in the practical efficacy of such codified knowledge was not accomplished by the mere existence of abstract knowledge; professional groups always have relied on external powers such as the state, the church, and the mass media to create public "needs" and to reinforce public acceptance of professional expertise in performing "necessary" tasks.

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Standardized communications in bureaucratic organizations serve other purposes. The stability of hierarchies of authority in bureaucratic organizations is facilitated by the fact that the rules governing relations between statuses are written and stored for posterity. As opposed to the heavily contextualized spoken word, writing is a more decontextualized public and official communication; it creates the image of actions undertaken by abstract social positions rather than persons, thereby transforming objective power into legitimate authority (Weber, 1922). This positional authority includes sets of positions (groups), such as a department in a bureaucratic organization, wherein authority is based in the perceived probability that others within the organization will support the power initiatives of incumbents of particular positions. Writing also differs from oral communication, which, over time, tends to be reinterpreted or forgotten. 10 Formally taught written language has

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encouraged rationalized commercial dealings, organizational decision making and implementation, and jurisprudence. Writing fixes communications in ways that enable consistent, accurate transmissions of information across geographical space and over time; it improves interpretations of meanings by all who participate in a language (Stubbs, 1980:10210).

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We must be careful not to conceive the ability to read, write, speak, count, and so on as a binary variable. Certainly, there are conceivable lower limits of facility in language and mathematics that would make it technically impossible to perform given jobs. But, equally important, we must realize that tremendous variations of usage exist within languages. Communication in bureaucracies is more than a mere technical need that may objectively be fulfilled by a qualified worker; the managerial positions that college graduates entered required communication within a language group (the one that most controlled economic institutions). 11 U.S. colleges originally were places where individuals learned formal expression in the Anglo-Protestant version of the English language. This was one of Collins' (1979) points regarding ethnic conflict as the driving force behind higher educational expansion, although I would argue that there was not much overt conflict regarding the

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imposition of this culture on typical nineteenthand early twentieth-century college students who previously were trained by their parents and schoolteachers in the fundamentals of the same, or a quite similar, cultural tradition. As opposed to the many regional and ethnic dialects that emerged in the course of the bounded interactions of everyday life, colleges taught a fairly standardized type of language or "code," to borrow Bernstein's (197175) terminology.

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Quite apart from the content of college courses, which often bore little relationship to real-life tasks in the work world, the form of what was learned greatly facilitated business communication between parties who stood at geographical or functional distances from one another (both within and across organizations) and also to committee-type decisionmaking processes within firms. Prior to the invention and widespread use of the typewriter, one task of schools (including colleges) was to improve student penmanship; businessmen lauded individuals who possessed a "good business hand" (i.e., an ability to write legibly in correspondence and, of course, in ledgers).12 Archival documents of learned individuals dating well into the twentieth century clearly evidence this ability to produce standardized written forms; it is likely that oral communications between such individuals similarly were uniform. Hence, from a purely technical standpoint, colleges successfully

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produced useful individuals for organizations that required employees trained in standardized language expression and numeracy. Another function of language skills involves the subsequent on-the-job training of employees. Formal schools rarely teach individuals the specific skills required to perform various entrylevel occupational tasks or the new tasks that accompany changes of job duties or promotions. Nevertheless, schools do acclimate individuals to the training process,

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which includes learning new procedures and learning obedience to authorities. Graff (1979:195233) has shown that, for the nineteenthcentury U.S. working class, literacy often was not a requirement for performing workingclass jobs. Common school-level literacy did not improve working-class renumeration, even though secondary education (at that point, still rare for the working class) did have monetary payoffs. 13 Common schools for the working class were the combined result of evangelical Protestant morality, strong popular feelings of nationalism (partly inspired by ethnic fears), and the interests of industrial capitalists in workers who had "training in being trained" (M. Katz, 1968; Soltow & Stevens, 1982:193201; Tyack, 1966, 1974). Because working-class jobs typically required little or no literacy, employer interests in common schools centered on their ability to inculcate in children compliant dispositions to authorities. Employers valued the

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potential for employee self-education (e.g., in contexts in which direct instruction and supervision were not feasible). Workers' abilities to read manuals and memorandums about new production and administrative procedures, or workers' abilities to research written materials in order to solve unanticipated problems were more important in higher positions. Consequently, recruitment to such jobs favored more literate candidates.

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Beyond assuring employers of college graduates' proficiencies in the technical requirements of literacy and numeracy, colleges also produced a relatively uniform character type, the "college man or woman," who could be expected to get along with other employees, especially fellow graduates. This ability was valuable to organizations that lacked other means of facilitating cooperation among incumbents in key positions (who spanned a variety of types of economic and status group affiliations). This ability to "get along" was evidence of commitment to organizational goals rather than self-interest and, hence, a useful control mechanism. In Merton's (1949:387420) terminology, colleges molded a "cosmopolitan'' character type out of students who, despite considerable social homogeneity, in some senses (e.g., as products of peculiar prior education, religious traditions, class cultures, etc.) were still "locals."14 While Protestant religious culture forged a fairly

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universal character type for organizational recruitment up to the mid-nineteenth century, the late nineteenth-century colleges, couched in ideologies of universally accessible scientific knowledge and judgement of students by merit, became mass producers of uniformly literate individuals. In some U.S. workplaces, introduction of cosmopolitan outsiders from newer scientifically based "research" universities doubtless offered such employers advantages in terms of worker innovativeness, managerial control over recalcitrant "local" subordinates, and simple availability of

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college-educated recruits (compared with the alternative practice of internal promotion of "locals" trained at small, traditional, regional liberal arts colleges).

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Not all of what professionals or bureaucratic managers do concerns making written records and correspondences; oral facility with esoteric languages remains, even in modern organizations, a major job requirement. Kanter (1977), for example, argued that much of what managers do in their work is to "talk" with other managers and officials at meetings, events, public addresses, and so forth. Oratorical skills are very important in these situations; colleges, of course, offered rather extensive training in this area. Similarly, the training of evangelical ministers had to do with providing tools for effective speech making that, through emotional arousal, could create feelings of group solidarity in their audiences. Several attributes of oral communication make such communication crucial in workplaces. Much "work time" in professional and upperlevel bureaucratic employment is not directed to task completion at all, but to socializing over a variety of topics. From such

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conversation, workers gain subjective feelings of satisfaction with their employment and of solidarity, which indirectly aid in the completion of collectively pursued tasks. Conversations in leisure time away from work also create feelings of worker solidarity and loyalty to the workplace because, by absorbing greater portions of workers' lives in leisure activities, the organization is able to make life outside the organization seem undesirable or unimaginable. 15 From a strictly formal standpoint, oral communications offer other advantages over written communication. Innovations are more likely to occur through spoken media than through the written word. The very advantage of fixing communications in writing proves to be a hindrance when changes are needed. Speech allows for more rapid transmission of information and, thus, quicker assessment of how much a given individual is ''like you" and trustworthy. Decision making in spoken contexts allows near

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simultaneous inputs from numerous actors, thereby improving rational consideration of alternative courses of action. Technically Based Labor Market Recruitment Uncertainties When an organizational staff charged with hiring new personnel goes about recruiting new workers, they want to know if candidates can perform efficiently in the position that must be filled and they want to know if prospective workers will, in fact, make serious and sustained efforts to accomplish the tasks at hand. In other words, organizations attempt to replace members with individuals who, given available information

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about the job and/or objective to be accomplished, will have the technical know-how, contacts, interpersonal skills, and so on to do the job and who can be controlled Coy various means that are discussed in the next section) sufficiently to assure actual performance (including performance in cooperative projects) for some acceptable period of time prior to leaving the organization. Etzioni (1975:25564) reminds us that selectivity in recruitment is most characteristic in situations in which considerable uncertainty about adequate task performance (both from technical and control standpoints) prevails, whereas on-the-job socialization and training is characteristic of positions in which routines already are established (and, partly as a consequence of this fact, in which direct or resultsbased supervision is possible). Recruitment to most high-level organizational positions is fraught with uncertainties, but how much any given organization can reduce the uncertainties

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involved with the recruitment of new members (who were formally trained in college) varies. Most of the differences in these uncertainties concern the nature of the tasks to be performed and types of employee control that are available to the organization. First, I will consider uncertainties about technical aspects of performance.

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As Stinchcombe (1968:24865; 1986a; 1990:47) has pointed out, the concept of "uncertainty" in social actions and organizations (and the transformation of uncertainty into routine) fundamentally rests on the assumption of variations associated with work activities. Decision making is more complex in tasks that deal with large amounts of information and wide ranges of variation. Routine tasks occur in jobs that involve relatively little variation in activities, whereas extraordinary tasks deal with considerable variation in activities. Stinchcombe goes on to identify three basic types of uncertainty that are associated with the technical aspects of performing tasks. One source of uncertainty is determined by the amount of information contained in the very goods and services that are manipulated or provided. For example, a purchasing agent who buys each product from only one distributor deals with less information than an agent who has several possible suppliers for each product;

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in the latter case, the agent may need to find the cheapest or best product, whereas in the former case these decisions are ruled out by the limitations of the supply network. The uncertainties embedded in the position of the agent with multiple suppliers are produced by the variations in outcomes resultant of alternative decisions. A situation in which many means equally achieve the same end is not as beset with uncertainties, as these alternative means are functionally equivalent. A second cause of uncertainty in organizations and their subunits derives from the fact that the types of tasks of actors that are required

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may vary over time. In this case, routine performance is not possible because individuals and groups can not predict what will need to be done in the future. For instance, a retailer who operates one store and wants to build a new store because a better market exists in a different location may contract for an architect and construction firm to oversee the project. By contrast, a steadily expanding retail chain that regularly pursues new markets already may have integrated (or routinized) new construction into its organizational structure in the form of a permanent construction division. Task variability uncertainty also is common in organizations and positions that tend to reach their objectives and, hence, must either dissolve or change objectives. Two typical organizational strategies for reduction of this type of variability are, first, to hire generalists who are perceived by recruiters as being adaptable to unforeseen changes. Colleges and their graduates often claim to instill or

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possess such qualities. These criteria may seem to constitute a job description, but the variation in future activities obviously does not permit rational calculation of technical competence for uncertain tasks; perceptions of adaptability, however, may be defined in negation as an absence of specialization. A second strategy is to subcontract tasks that are objective-based to outside parties. In this case, Stinchcombe (1968:26061) argues that a system for the certification of technical competence typically develops and becomes the main criteria for hiring consultants. Competence of practitioners often is certified by membership in wider regulatory agencies or associations (e.g., professional societies, state licensing bureaus, and franchising organizations). Because organizations typically do not know which skills, among subcontractors' skill repertoire, will be needed in order to accomplish tasks, such personnel usually are given considerable autonomy in task performance.

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Finally, a most common type of uncertainty arises in organizations and positions in which decisions about objectives must be made prior to the availability of pertinent information. The causes of this type of uncertainty stem from lack of adequate information about what other relevant actors will do and what technical impediments may block the implementation of decisions. Incumbents of many organizational positions must regularly make decisions based on inadequate information. For employers, the typical solution to this problem has been to recruit persons who possess special qualities (e.g., by past individual demonstrations of charisma or by acknowledged, socially acquired magical competencies) in hopes that these capabilities will eliminate the uncertainties attached to critical facets of organizations. It would seem that the main difference between this type of uncertainty and uncertainty based in complex subject

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matter is that there really are no rational criteria for

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decision making in the first case, whereas complexity can be deciphered in the latter case. Where decisions must be made without adequate information, there is room for individuals and collectivities to fabricate magic-based competence; where objectively correct decision making about merely complex subject matter can be measured by parties who desire a particular outcome, the development of organized communities of magically competent decision makers (e.g., professions) is a less likely outcome.

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The types of organizational uncertainty listed above all present problems germane to the recruitment process, as in each case recruiters must assess the probability that workers can perform adequately in specific positions. An important additional problem arises for recruiters: positions that adequately deal with organizational uncertainties stand to gain considerable and potentially destructive powers over other positions and over the organization as a whole. Pfeffer (1981:10912) has summarized the power correlates of positions, subunits, and organizations that deal with (reduce or make claims to the same effect) technical uncertainties. The powers that accrue to actors are determined by (1) the ability of actors to reduce uncertainties for other actors, (2) the extent to which actors are the only available source of uncertainty reduction, and (3) the degree of importance that uncertain tasks assume in the workings of other actors. Basically, the powers that accompany the

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ability to deal with uncertainty imply a social relationship of dependence. Next, I explore the problem of the organizational control of such positions. Control-Based Labor Market Recruitment Uncertainties Apart from the uncertainties that develop from the nature of tasks in organizations, performance also depends on the abilities of some positions effectively to control the actions of incumbents of other positions (i.e., to guarantee other actors in fact will do what they are supposed to do). This section deals with the varieties of organizational control and the uses of education as a means of assuring employee compliance. I shall demonstrate that educational credentials are the favored means of employee control in situations in which other control means are not feasible alternatives.

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Three Types of Organizational Control Etzioni (1975) discussed three organizational control strategies"coercive," "utilitarian," and "normative"which are characteristic of specific

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types of organizational structures. Although these types are separable analytically, intermediate forms empirically are quite common. Variations exist in control of organizational subordinates not just of entire organizations, but also of positional strata of organizations. My primary concern is with the third type of control, normative compliance, because formal education may be seen as one means of establishing this type of control. Still, it is important to observe the formal differences between this type of control and other types to understand why some occupations become objects of relative credential monopolies, whereas other occupations do not.

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The first type, coercive control, implies the threat or use of force to gain compliance from subordinates. Coercion may range from the withholding of valuable resources to the use of physical or psychological punishment. As a strategy of control, this method has inherent weaknesses that include the general tendency of humans to resist force, difficulties involved with enforcing quality performances, associated low performance standards of physically or psychologically impoverished workers, and costliness of a coercive administrative apparatus. Coercive control is difficult to implement in situations where subordinates must perform in geographically dispersed settings, because a great many supervisors are required to oversee such tasks. Beyond this, supervisors must themselves be controlled, and this task obviously must be accomplished by means other than coercion, lest the chain of supervision become infinite. Coercive controls are most characteristic in

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organizations in which new recruits are plentiful and the nature of tasks allows direct supervision, for example, the military, prisons, slave labor organizations, schools whose primary goal is discipline.

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A second type of control strategy operates through the basic mechanism of resource exchange. The objective equity of such exchanges between dominants and subordinates is less important for gaining compliance than is the subjective belief on the part of subordinates that the exchanges are fair. The exchange basis of this strategy results in much lower administrative costs compared to those associated with coercive means of control. Historical examples of reward as a control strategy range from those that border on coercive controlserfdom's exchange of labor for military protection in feudalism, for exampleto the wagelabor system of modern industrial capitalism. The disadvantages of this method are that (1) exchanges may be more costly than exercise of force, especially when subordinates can successfully organize to advance their own interests vis--vis those of their superiors, (2) productivity is not guaranteed if subordinates are interested solely in

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improving their material well-being, and (3) turnover is increased because subordinates can

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leave the organization at will (e.g., if competitor organizations offer better rewards). Compliancethrough-reward strategies are most consistent with situations where the supply of subordinates is short and the material wealth of controlling parties permits provision of substantial, everincreasing rewards. Several shortcomings of coercive and exchange mechanisms are overcome with the third type of control, normative compliance, which involves securing, through various means, subordinates' feelings of belonging to the organization and/or its subunits:

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Normative organizations are organizations in which normative power is the major source of control over most lower participants, whose orientation to the organization is characterized by high commitment. Compliance in normative organizations rests principally on internalization of directives accepted as legitimate. Leadership, rituals, manipulation of social and prestige symbols, and resocialization are among the more important techniques of control used (Etzioni, 1975:40). 16

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The goal of normative control is to create feelings of solidarity that effectively mask prevailing power structures by making hierarchies seem either nonexistent or justifiable. The difference between this type of compliance and rule through coercive or reward mechanisms is similar to Weber's (1922:212301; 94154) distinction between "legitimate domination" and "domination by a constellation of interests." The beliefs held by subordinates (often imposed by superiors) are central to the notion of legitimate authority because they define existing power relations as either moral, necessary (by virtue of tradition or functional indispensability), democratically produced, or temporary (e.g., the devaluation of worldly power structures in salvation religions or promises of future rewards in the career ladders of organizations).

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Principal historical examples of normative organizations include religious organizations, ideological political organizations, colleges, voluntary associations, and professional organizations (Etzioni, 1975:66). The advantages of control through legitimate domination are that subordinates can be expected to perform well both in terms of quantity and quality of tasks, supervision is unnecessary or minimal, and legitimacy is more stable (i.e., it engenders less conflict) than with other means of control. This seems to be an ideal means of control, but the beliefs that stand at the base of normative controls are not so easily or even cheaply established. Furthermore, normative control may require some redistribution of organizational power that, beyond mere symbolic power delegation (concessions of symbolic power may beget demands for real

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power), is inconsistent with the very idea of "control." Normative control traditionally has been a strategy that was employed where renumerative and coercive strategies had limited efficacy.

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Normative controls were very characteristic of the organizations and positions that college graduates entered, regardless of the period under consideration. On the other hand, there were many normatively controlled organizations that did not recruit college graduates, but rather, recruited individuals who demonstrated potential loyalty by other credentials (e.g., religious affiliation or familial ties). Because I am not concerned with normative controls per se, my central question is a limiting one: Why did particular organizations increasingly recruit college graduates rather than holders of other credentials? Next, I examine alternative means of recruitment to organizational positions. Employee Recruitment and Organizational Control

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Professional groups tend to require formal education of their recruits because such training promotes solidarity through mechanisms such as guaranteed advancement through organizational career structures, socialization to professional ideologies, and standardization of procedures. Why are some upper-level positions in bureaucratic organizations also objects of degree-based recruitment? One might expect a rationalized bureaucratic chain of command to solve employee control problems without recourse to solidarity norms, but growth in size and diversification of organizational functions in bureaucracies creates new regions of discretionary power that demand control strategies similar to means used in professional contexts. The process of educational credentialing is one way control over these positions may be exercised.

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While growth of autonomous positions, departments, and divisions most often challenges state and economic bureaucracies, organizations and organizational subunits that pursue cultural (as opposed to political and economic) goals face a different additional problem: recruiting members who understand, agree with, and will adhere to their goals. Political and economic "community building" rests on a more "universal" basis (e.g., profits or control) than does the formation of cultural communities (e.g., sects, scientific groups, social movements, etc.). Organizations that cannot assume members' concurrence with organizational character risk inadequacies in employee performance for a variety of reasonsthe individual's self-interest, factionalism among employees who might benefit from either collective conflict or competition with other organizational actors, and undesirable employee allegiance to external organizations.

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Etzioni (1975:256) suggested that the means of recruitment to organizations will be very similar to the means by which members are controlled. Coercive organizations, for example, mainly rely on force (e.g., capture or state-supported incarceration) in securing new recruits. By contrast, utilitarian organizations tend to use lucrative rewards (e.g., salaries and benefits) as primary incentives for drawing in new members. Many positions within utilitarian organizations also are controlled by checking the results of task performances. Where this strategy is possible (i.e., where superiors have the administrative means and technical ability to measure performances and where workers can be expected to perform a more or less limited range of routine tasks), we would expect organizations, in addition to offering material incentives for quality work, to seek out recruits who have demonstrated abilities to perform given tasks. Examples of such measures of competence

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include information gained through personal interviews, technical examinations of various sorts, and reliable evidence of previous successful performances (e.g., letters of reference gained from technically proven individuals either within or outside the organization).

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Recruitment to normatively controlled positions typically is based less on individuals' technical capabilities for performing tasks (although this is a common additional consideration) than on expectations that individuals will act in accordance with organizational directives, even where force, reward, and surveillance are absent. Recruitment to these organizations is based on employer calculations of the trustworthiness of candidates in various capacities. A fundamental criterion of selection concerns the value and interest-based similarity of candidates to other relevant participants in the organization. Where other means of control are less effective, recruiters seek out workers who are not simply similar to themselves (the recruiters) as individuals, but are similar to their prospective work group. This suggests an important aspect of organizational control: recruiters want workers who already are "members" of the prospective work group so that they can count on other members to help

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enforce compliant behaviors. In other words, the authority superiors hold over the recruit is based partly on the probability that other group members will help enforce their will over the interests of the recruit. For example, adults typically are inclined to hire other adults because they believe that other adults in the organization can influence an adult recruit in ways that might not work with younger recruits (where the parents of youths are not reliable allies). This example is not incidental. One general effect of participation in higher education is that youths become more responsible over the years spent in schooling; that

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is, they become more like adults who inhabit workplaces in terms of their interest-based loyalties to other adults and their cultural values.

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The assumptions guiding decisions to hire similar others include reckoning that the recruit has sufficient interest in being a member of the group or sufficient fear of group reprisals not to risk transgressions against the group. However, in some circumstances, it is possible for recruits to "cheat" collectivities and to evade the coercive pressures of the group while nonetheless collecting the benefits of group membership (as shown in the examples of workers who shirk responsibilities and receive guaranteed salaries). This is the so-called "free-rider" problem. The degree to which recruits challenge authority is based not only on the objective benefits to be gained through group membership, but also on recruits' beliefs that they "should" contribute to collective enterprises and obey superiors in order to achieve this end. Thus, recruitment and control of positions characterized by considerable autonomy often entails more than mere considerations of exchanges of interest and

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coercive powers of similar others. Such positions may require what Durkheim (1893) called a "pre-contractual" basis for social solidarity (i.e., hiring based on knowledge that recruits will act in organizational interests due to specific moral commitments to the group). 17 Such morals tend to be esoteric precisely because they speak not to worldly interests that easily lead to divisiveness, but to abstract ideas and principles far removed from arenas of self-interest. One function of abstract higher educational content lies here, in the inculcation of cooperative ideals to graduates, so that in workplaces they can be expected to conform to these ideals rather than self-interest.

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The criteria employed in recruitment to historical organizations have been determined not only by the means of organizational control, but also by the relative size and functional complexity of the organization. Large organizations with many functions deal not only with the problem of finding individuals who are capable and trustworthy enough to perform important tasks, but also, and especially under conditions of organizational growth, with the problems associated with staffing large numbers of positions. Within smaller organizations, the primordial qualifications of similarity concerned kinship, age, and gender; larger modern organizations generally have expanded their recruitment bases to include nationalistic, regional, ethnic, political party, and, of course, educational group memberships as evidence of trustworthiness. Normative controls would be predictable in organizations in which positions are characterized by sufficient autonomy to require indirect control.

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In addition, we would expect the growth and diversification of such orga-

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nizations to be accompanied by the abstraction of social categories of recruitment, sometimes including use of formal educational credentials. Conclusion

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My theory may be summarized by asking why employers pick degree holders for particular job openings and promotions. In the early part of this chapter I argued that certain prerequisites had to be met in order for extensive credentialism to arise. One reason for picking degree holders is that they may be there as readily accessible recruits who regularly possess certain desirable technical and behavioral dispositions. Graduates may possess requisite skills to perform needed tasks but, even more pertinent, they may hold a claim, accepted by employers, that they can reduce the uncertainty involved with some aspect of organizational work. Another trait that employers may seek and college people may hold is a probability the degree holder will not compete with colleagues or conflict with organizational superiors. This cooperation spans contexts in which workers must remain solidary vis--vis client markets, public perceptions, and competitor organizations. Organizational

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pressures for worker solidarity also introduce an expansive dynamic to credentialism. Once degree holders gain a foothold in the upper levels of a labor market as recruitment decision makers, there is a further solidarity-based tendency for such recruiters to hire other degree holders with similar life experiences. Thus, entire labor markets may become dominated by degree holders of particular social types (e.g., Ivy leaguers, Ph.D.s, M.B.A.s, or social work majors).

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Historical changes in labor market organization that have heightened the above needs and provided favorable conditions for higher educational expansion include a general increase in the nature of economic and political activities that require formally taught communications skills; simple growth in the volume, functional diversity, and geographic range of economic and political activities undertaken by modern organizations; and increases in the number of statesupported monopolistic professional labor market movements. I shall return to the details of historical cases of growth of labor market recruitment of college-educated individuals in Chapter 6. First, I examine the forces that allowed for an early proliferation of higher educational institutions in the United States. This is the task of Chapter 4, which follows. Then, in Chapter 5, I discuss the mechanisms that sustained large numbers of U.S. colleges until firm labor market connections emerged.

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4 Political, Cultural, and Economic Origins of Extensive College Founding

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The central argument of this chapter is that an absence of state control of higher education, a multivalent Protestant cultural tradition of college-educated clergy, and peculiar economic incentives to college founding, produced an extensive persisting institutional base of colleges, a base upon which U.S. educational credentialism later flourished. Political factors permitted, and cultural traditions and economic inducements stimulated, higher educational expansion. A large set of independent higher educational institutions had been in place for 60 years by the 1890s, when (1) greater bureaucratic and professional labor-market recruitments of college graduates began, and (2) stratification of educational institutions (e.g., high schools, professional schools, and colleges) within a system commenced. This institutional base was a readymade mechanism for the selection of employees in some large organizations and also for monopolization of aspiring professional practices.

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The vast institutional structure of U.S. higher education probably would not have emerged without early, land-speculative economic interests in college founding. State or denominational control of higher education might have been more complete in the absence of such an early proliferation of colleges. It is also unlikely so many schools would have been founded and students recruited in the short period between 1890 and 1930, when so many occupational bonds to higher education were wrought. Alternative solutions to problems concerning job monopolization, work skills, and organizational control are imaginable and, in fact, existed in nascent forms. More extensive apprenticeship programs could have fulfilled many problems regarding job monopolies. Where formal training for work skills was needed, organizations could further have developed their own schools, adopted examination-based recruitment, or relied more heavily on the many quasi-colleges

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that were in place and that taught, for example, basic business skills. In Chapter 5, I shall argue that competitor institutions, such as the small business colleges spawned by educational entrepreneurs, the high schools with their commercial

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courses, and the great proliferation of noncollege-affiliated professional schools posed a threat (largely unacknowledged by college administrators) to the eventual course of formal higher educational expansion. The need for organizational control based in loyalty to the organization could have been solved through more systematic recruitment of like-minded individuals from cultural groups other than collegians (e.g., religious and ethnic groups or through more thorough checking of other credentials such as personal and employer references). These alternatives were never pursued to the extent they might have been because college recruitment already existed as a workable solution to various hiring problems. The Absence of Centralized State or Church Control of Higher Education

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The United States and Europe Nearly all historical higher education systems have been very closely tied to either the church or the state. The dynamics of educational expansion and conflict over control of higher educational systems have always been influenced by the relative powers of the church and state to create and regulate education-based occupational positions. The priesthood, military leadership, and magical healers were the most common ancient education-based credential monopolies (Rashdall, 1895; Reeves, 1914). Higher civil servants, lawyers, and educators, where they succeeded, established extensive credential monopolies only after the emergence of the modern state (Marrou, 1948).

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The organizational structure of American higher education originally was modeled after European, and particularly British, institutions. The European universities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were structured very much like their Medieval forerunners, for example, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Leipzig, and Louvain (Rashdall, 1895). European university education was linked to a specific range of occupations and tended to recruit from elites for most of these positions. The American adaption of this European model entailed some major alterations, most particularly in the types of positions that graduates entered and in more open access to numerous colleges. U.S. higher education indeed grew, and I indicated earlier when and where such growth took place. Did European universities also expand at roughly the same time? Certainly, as Collins (1981a) points out, Euro-

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pean universities went through historical cycles of growth and contraction long prior to 1800. For most European countries, the nineteenth century was characterized by increasing enrollments. Reliable comparisons of U.S. and European higher education prior to 1870 are not available, but, as Table 4.1 suggests, it is difficult to assume that the same mechanisms could have spurred such phenomenal growth of U.S. higher education and comparatively meager rises in Europe. For European nations with comparable available statistics, none reach even half the enrollments of the population aged 1519 for the entire 18701930 period. 1 Over time, the proportion of U.S. enrollments began to dwarf those of most European states, such that even France (which experienced significant growth after 1900) had only one-fourth the proportional enrollments of the United States in 1930. The case of the United States is also interesting in that expansion was not confined to rising

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enrollments in a few elite colleges. By 1850, there were more colleges in the United States than in all of Europe combined (Collins, 1979:11819). A key to understanding American college growth is that a multiplication of institutions of equal status preceded enrollment growth in particular elite schools.

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One reason why colleges so abounded in the United States was that widespread primary and secondary education did not exist prior to the initial college expansion. The American educational system of the nineteenth century, especially higher and secondary education, initially grew from the top downward instead of the more typical pattern of expansion at lower levels followed by growth at higher levels. As Table 1.1 suggests, the percentage of the population aged 1821 enrolled in higher education was very close to the percentage of the population aged 17 that had graduated from secondary school up to 1890, and, in fact, exceeded the percentage of 17-year-old secondary school graduates in 1880. Even though 17 was not a set age for graduation from secondary school during this era, this figure is telling of the high proportion of secondary school graduates that went on to college.

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Common schools were founded in large numbers at about the same time as the colleges, but public high schools did not proliferate until the late nineteenth century. The predominant form of secondary instruction until the 1880s was the denominational academy, which existed either as a geographically separate school or as a lower department of a college. Many colleges started as academies and, sometimes after only one cohort of academy graduates, became combined academy/colleges. Other colleges began as colleges and established academies in order to supplement recruitments from regional academies (a good deal of nineteenthcentury college finance depended on adequate academy recruitment).

TABLE 4.1 U.S. and Selected European Higher Educational E Population Age 1519, 18701930

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 19 Country 1,000s % 1,000s % 1,000s % 1,000s % 1,000s % 1,0 United States 52.0 1.29 116.0 2.32 Austria 11.6 .61 13.3 .64 Belgium 2.6 4.6 .91 Finland .7 .41 .7 .36 France Germany Hungary 2.6 .18 4.4 .26 Italy 12.1 .50 11.9 .45 Netherlands 1.2 1.5 Norway 1.0 .8 Switzerland Note: A comparison based on the age group 1519 is the best a the nature of ''higher education," make comparisons difficult. education was equivilent to or exceeded that of many U.S. co occupied far greater proportions of the eligible population tha Sources: B. R. Mitchell (1975), European Historical Statistic 10, 21011.

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Colonial Colleges

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The pre-Revolutionary American colleges afford the closest approximation of the typical European model of church and state regulation of college foundings and degree granting, but importantly, the colonial colleges were more the domain of regional and sectarian elites than of a national elite. The Anglican church held little influence over the colonial colleges. The nine colleges in the colonies at the time of the American Revolution were granted corporate charters either by state assemblies (e.g., Harvard and Yale) or by the British throne (e.g., Kings [Columbia] and Dartmouth). The original colleges were partly the offspring of combined regional and denominational rivalries. Their clientele were the sons of local church and colonial elites destined for ministerial and high-level civil service positions. Colonial colleges were funded by the states, local communities, churches, and individual benefactors. As Whitehead (1973) has argued, the distinction between

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state and private higher education was not an important one during the colonial period, nor was it so after the Revolution and through most of the nineteenth century. There were many relations between the states and the colleges, but neither funding nor appointment of boards of trustees ever became a matter of lasting state responsibility. There were, of course, many instances in which colleges sought greater state financial support, but local interests were the typical basis for most college finance. 2 The states and the federal government also established schools, but after their initial grants of land and perhaps some money, they relinquished control to the sometimes denominationally affiliated state universities and their self-perpetuating boards of trustees.

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The main involvement of the state was in granting college charters and, here, policies were extremely liberal from Colonial days onward. The case of Dartmouth College v. the state of New Hampshire is sometimes viewed as one wherein the rights of private colleges were upheld against state intrusions (in this case, the revoking of a charter). Actually, the state had no interest in such a cause; the state entered Dartmouth affairs only at the request of the Dartmouth president, who sought to remove trustees by legal means (Herbst, 1982:23243; Whitehead, 1973:5388). The outcome was a landmark decision for corporate law, as the state upheld the autonomy of Dartmouth and the inviolability of legal charters in higher education.

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In professional, technical, and business education, state influence was also minimal prior to the late nineteenth century when the state-supported licensure efforts of elite professional groups increased. The multiplication of legal, medical, and normal schools in the nineteenth

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century suggests that it was extremely easy to start a private professional school. Hundreds of private business colleges, including franchise operations such as Bryant and Stratton or Brown's business colleges, were present even in remote rural towns by the 1860s. Agricultural and engineering institutes, some called "people's colleges" or "workingmen's colleges," also were chartered easily, although these endeavors had high failure rates. The National University Movement: Centralized, Elite Higher Education Defeated

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The alternative development to such a proliferation of schools has been, in most other contexts, the maintenance of national universities. Madsen (1966) has shown how repeated efforts to establish a national university in the United States never succeeded. Even though most proposals for such an institution specified a European-style, graduate institution that would not supplant existing colleges, popular and legislative objections to the antireligious, aristocratic, and unconstitutional nature of such an institution prevented its founding. Lawmakers and the public were more interested in using federal funds for the establishment of canals or a national bank. The failures of efforts to establish a national university in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century allowed graduate education to follow the same decentralized pattern as undergraduate schooling.

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Benjamin Rush was the original advocate of a national university, but debate over the issue at the Constitutional Convention (1787) did not result in federal empowerment to found a national university. Rush considered the federal university a training place for all higher civil service positions, to which only college graduates would be admitted. Washington was a strong advocate and Jefferson was a lukewarm supporter of the idea, but through 1870 the constitutionality of a national university remained a stumbling block for these and other supporters of a national university. Even the establishment of a national scientific institute won little support between 1838 and 1845; the Smithsonian Institute, founded in 1846, was established with funds from a British Royal Society scientist.

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From 1870 to 1874, agitation for a federal university was led by John W. Hoyt, with significant support from the National Teachers Association. Hoyt's school would resemble earlier proposals and would be funded with a $10,000,000 endowment raised from sales of federal lands. This ambitious effort had the support of some reputable college presidents, but Hoyt managed to insult other powerful college presidents, most

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notably Charles Eliot of Harvard, who regarded their institutions as intellectual equals of the European institutions that the national university would imitate. The issue languished after Hoyt's movement lost adherents. Weak attempts to establish a national university continued to emerge, including an unsuccessful attempt to lure the financial support of the Carnegie Foundation in 1906. By this point, new research universities, such as Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago already were established. Graduate programs at other elite institutions also had been started, thereby decreasing the likelihood of a capstone American institution.

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The role of the federal government in U.S. higher education up to 1930 was rather inconsequential from the standpoint of direct control of colleges, but the state exerted a veiled influence on higher education by 1900. Even state acquiescence as other powerful groups, such as the regional accrediting associations of the 1890s and the foundations of the twentieth century, guided higher educational development may be viewed as deliberate inaction (Barrow, 1990). Indirect influence also came in the form of education-related licensures of occupational practices and professional training institutions (Larson, 1977). We shall address these forces in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6. Competition and Cultural Tradition in U.S. Higher Education

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Besides favorable political circumstances, specific cultural traditions fostered collegiate expansion. We already have reviewed the laissezfaire policies of the state with regard to higher education. In the absence of the state, the actions of Protestant (especially New England Calvinist denominations) missionary societies in founding frontier colleges and the concomitant interests of small and large investors in real estate were crucial not only to foundings of schools, but also to their financial solvencies at least through 1890. Religio-Ethnic Competition

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One complex of forces that encouraged college founding centered around religious and ethnic group competition. The case of relatively "pure" religious competition brings to mind the sectarian competition that is so often cited by traditional educational historians as a primary determinant of early higher educational expansion and/or of the very religious aura of early colleges (Hofstadter, 1963; Hofstadter & Metzger, 1955;

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Rudolf, 1962, 1978; Tewksberry, 1932; Veysey, 1965). Atypical argument of this sort suggests the following scenario:
Nineteenth-century America was a religious nation composed of numerous Protestant sects and Catholics. All these groups were in competition with one another over religious dogma and each sought to establish colleges as symbols of their moral superiorities. This resulted in a needless duplication of colleges which were, in any case, out of step with industrializing America. Inevitably, many colleges closed due to their ill-adapted, religious characters. Some survived, however, and these and newer schools such as the state and research universities became more "practical" in their curriculum and so flourished.

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Most colleges were, of course, partly sponsored by religious organizations. But the commonsense argument above leaves out some crucial forces outside religion while failing to provide sufficient understanding of sectarian competition as such. Why did some denominations found more colleges than others and why did they do so at various points in time? Were various lay sectarians as concerned about colleges as their clerical leaders? Did sectarian competition ever really abate in the late nineteenth century and, if not, what does this imply? Were practical reforms really successful in making college instruction a preparation for industrial society (and what is it, exactly, about an industrial society that requires practical colleges)? Why did the state universities look so similar to the sectarian colleges for so long? We must explicate the nature of religious competition and weigh its significance in light of other causes of college founding.

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Other historians merely reiterate the documented need for ministers in the West. The much-publicized "need" for ministers in the West had several sources. Each sect sought eastern ministers as leaders and spokespersons in community political and economic affairs. In the East, concerns about which denomination, if any, would control the West were evident. Backsliding western Protestants were seen by many easterners as threats to the national order. In the absence of close religious ties, eastern interests correctly perceived that western regional differences would come to play a big part in national political and economic life. Western voting blocks were critical concerns; the ministers who went west often were, or soon became, political leaders in the West (although they did not always act in eastern interests).

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In the United States, complete control of higher education was not achieved by any particular denomination, even though Protestants (as

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opposed to Catholics) were the primary suppliers and consumers of higher education throughout the nineteenth century. New England was an early center for American higher education. The Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians who controlled most of the economic and political resources in the North were sponsors of colleges there. These denominations adhered to a tradition of a college-educated clergy and of decentralized social organization based in strong, independent institutions within each community. New England Protestants also attempted to exert influence in the West through the early establishment of New England-style towns and colleges.

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Despite the overepresentation of New Englanders in higher education, these groups never really established full control of higher education outside their region. In the Middle Atlantic colonies and in the South, the Baptists, Methodists, Dutch Reformed Church, and others established colleges that resembled the New England colleges except for minor regional and denominational differences. These groups also were active in establishing colleges in the western reaches of the colonies and, somewhat later, in the Old Northwest (Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) and western coastal regions. For all of the denominations, economically and politically derived religious schisms (e.g., between "New Light" and "Old Light" Presbyterians) were another source of new college foundings. Catholics and Anti-Catholicism

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Just as serious as the irreligiousness of the West was the perceived threat of Catholicism as the ideological mechanism mobilizing western ethnic interests. Popular fears of "Romish" plots to overthrow Protestant educational and political institutions were propagated by eastern Protestant leaders during the first half of the nineteenth century. During the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s and 1840s, evangelical ministers such as Lyman Beecher urged New England Protestants to halt the "papal conspiracy" that purportedly controlled higher education in the West, even though there is little evidence to show that Catholic groups had made much headway in founding colleges there (Beecher, 1835; Fraser, 1985; Meridith, 1963). 3 Oddly enough, this sort of agitation subsided by the 1850s, even though this was exactly when large numbers of Irish Catholics arrived. Anti-Catholicism often was used by western Protestants as a basis for soliciting eastern funds for western colleges and

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no doubt this tactic partly was responsible for the foundings of colleges by groups such as the Methodists, who showed little inclination toward higher education in the colonial East.

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By the 1830s, the influx of immigrant Irish and German Catholics and various ethnic Lutherans diluted the religious basis for higher educational control. Ethnic differences frequently were augmented by complex religious divisions (e.g., among Lutherans there were distinct synods holding Swedish, German, Norwegian, and Danish memberships). Regional antagonisms interfaced with religio-ethnic fissions and often produced new colleges. Quite apart from the desires of eastern Protestants to have cultural, political, economic control of the West, the Protestant settlers of frontier regions developed independent reasons for having colleges of their own.

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Protestants were much more active in college founding than Catholics, even in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the number of immigrant Catholics grew and urban Catholic colleges became more common. If the old immigrant Irish and German Catholics founded few colleges, the new Italian and eastern European Catholics who arrived after 1890 were even less successful in this activity, partly because many colleges already existed by then and a philanthropic foundation-initiated effort to consolidate higher education was underway (see Chapter 5). Catholics were more active than Protestants in primary and secondary education, but the proportion of parochial schools to Catholics was not as high as the proportion of private academies to many Protestant groups. Early Catholic colleges primarily trained priests for posts in congregations larger than those of Protestant ministers; this fact tended to keep bureaucratized Catholic higher education more

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centralized and less extensive than the diverse forms of Protestant higher education. Finally, Catholic colleges numbered fewer than Protestant colleges partly because immigrant Catholics were poorer than most groups. As mentioned in Chapter 3, a basic limitation on the level of formal cultural production of any group is the material wealth of the group. The tendency for informal, local cultural production is furthered in situations, as with U.S. Catholics, where other groups control most political and/or economic resources and have already created a pervasive, and at least formally "open," set of cultural institutions, such as the Protestant colleges and the state universities. U.S. ethnic Catholics in higher education took the path of what Archer (1982) called "integration" with existing colleges, rather than the "substitution" of separate institutions.

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Protestantism: The Early Preponderance of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Their Education Societies The majority of colleges founded up to 1820 were either Congregational or Presbyteriansponsored institutions, although the Episcopalians and

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Unitarians also were quite active up to this point. 4 All these sects stressed that the ministries of their congregations should be carried out not by lay clergy, but by formally educated ministers (Atkins & Fagley, 1942: 22945; Miller, 1976; Sweet, 193136:5481). In this tradition, they significantly differed from early American Baptists and Methodists who, although they greatly outnumbered the above groups, were less insistent on formal qualifications for ministers. The Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Unitarian churches also had wealthy memberships, particularly in New England and in the Middle Atlantic cities, but also in the West (at least in relation to other western groups).

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From 1820 to 1860, the bulk of college expansion took place in the trans-Appalachian West, especially in the Old Northwest. Historical documents and traditional educational historians often refer to a "need for ministers" in the West, but we should be careful not to translate these felt needs into needs for colleges, for only certain groups were concerned about college-educated ministers in the 1830s. Under their Plan of Union of 1801 northern Presbyterians and Congregationalists agreed to launch a joint effort: in evangelizing the Old Northwest (Miller, 1976:288). The New England "Prebygationalists," as they were called, also established several organizations that promoted college founding in the West (although these were not under formal ecclesiastical rule): the American Education Society (AES; 1816), which was a branch of the American Home Missionary Society (AHMS); and the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at

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the West (SPCTEW), which was organized in 1844 partly in response to the financial crises of western colleges following the Panic of 1837 (Goodykoontz, 1939; Johnson, 1972,1974). In Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota alone, at least 22 nineteenth-century colleges were Presbygationalist-sponsored (Burke, 1982; U.S.B.E., 1873, 1930). For 15 years after the founding of the AES, several other denominations established similar educational organizations, but all of these were under explicit denominational control (Goodykoontz, 1939:366405). Few of these societies were as active as the AHMS, which organized auxiliaries in each state as it expanded its operations, or the SPCTEW, which dispensed considerable funds to colleges in the West.

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From the start, the officers and benefactors of these organizations were well aware of the fact that religious competition and a variety of pecuniary interests fostered the duplication of higher educational services in the West. The SPCTEW even commissioned agents who visited prospective recipients of aid in order to insure that "Christian" rather than land-speculative economic interests (this topic is treated later in this chapter) guided college founding and college operations.5 The problem that the eastern educational societies faced was that, while they

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generally favored expansion of Presbygational educational development in the West, they feared that the western colleges merely were using eastern monetary assistance for private economic gain and localized religious status elevation. In an effort to resolve such regional differences, the published reports of these educational organizations consistently address the issue of eastern and western "unity" based on lofty "Christian ideals" and opposition to common "enemies." Also, in 1844, the SPCTEW noted that ''[t]he introduction of something like a system [sic] into educational movements at the West, has met with a warm response in the East" (SPCTEW, 1844:10). The SPCTEW was the first large organization to make a serious, although ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to limit college expansion and to stratify education by reserving the title "college" to "qualified" institutions. 6

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As we shall discuss in detail later in this chapter, one of the more prevalent abuses of college founding was related to land speculation, so western college agents always were on the lookout for such interests. Nevertheless, by 1855, the SPCTEW itself began to encourage western college finance through the endowment of these schools with western lands that might be sold at a profit:
Were the history of the West fully written, one of its saddest chapters would be that which gave the details of land speculations in 1836, and years adjacent. It need not be stated that whatever could affect the nominal value of Western acres was eagerly employed to give it the utmost possible inflation. Colleges were not exempted. . . . In the midst of this prostration the Society had its origin.

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The method of endowing Colleges, now under consideration, so far as simple pecuniary interests are concerned, could probably be adopted with more safety than in 1836. The railroad system, e.g., not only produces marvelous development, but gives stability to the rapidly increased value of property. No doubt can exist as to the propriety and importance of taking advantage of the rise of value in Western lands, especially when such lands can be secured as donations (SPCTEW, 1855:42).7

The SPCTEW had seized on the promise of railway transportation as a means of western town and college development, but so had everyone else. Although the land speculation market never again hit bottom as it had in the late 1830s, many more groups became involved in landspeculative college founding in the railroadbuilding era and, as a consequence, the multiplication and frequent failures of western colleges continued until the 1890s.

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In many cases, colonization of the West was led by eastern mission-

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ary leaders of so-called "emigrating companies." The great wave of evangelism that swept the East during the Second Great Awakening, best exemplified in the fiery speeches of the charismatic minister Lyman Beecher, 8 no doubt frenzied many young men into joining the ministry and going west.

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Thus, the education societies did more than encourage the growth of western colleges. Formal training was required before young zealots could go west under the auspices of Congregationalism or Presbyterianism. Allmendinger (1975) has demonstrated a marked change in the social composition of New England colleges beginning around 1800. Crowded conditions in western New England agricultural regions left few economic prospects for second and third sons of farmers. Poorer farmers' sons had begun to infiltrate the colleges in the early 1800s and continued to grow in numbers throughout the early nineteenth century. These men (they were older than previous students) frequently received charitable aid from community churches up until the founding of the AES, which, by 1838, had developed an elaborate bureaucratic organization that funded, in some part, the education of one-seventh of all New England college students (Allmendinger, 1975:65). By 1819, the AES

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loaned money that was to be paid back by the recipient, thereby establishing a permanent source of funding for new recruits. A number of these graduates went west not just to serve existing communities, but to found new ones. And, in many instances, they started not only towns, but also colleges for the towns. The "Yale Band" of seminary graduates, which included Asa Turner, Julian Sturtevant, Jonathan B. Turner, and Theron Baldwinall of whom were instrumental in Illinois college founding, is a prime example (Cook, 1912; Doyle, 1978; Frank, 1979; Fraser, 1985; Sturtevant, 1896; Webster, 1912). Similarly, the "Iowa Band" of Andover graduates was effective in starting schools in that state (Parker, 1893; Payne, 1938). Once established by these missionaries, some western colleges (e.g., Oberlin) became centers that generated graduates who established colleges yet further west.

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The New England Presbygationalists were very successful in launching many early western frontier settlements and colleges in previously remote areas (other than in major river towns, which were established early and frequently were dominated by Catholic educational institutions). By the 1850s, several other denominations, particularly the Methodists, had changed their policies toward colleges, and even toward college-centered ministerial training to some degree. German and Scandinavian Lutherans also established a fair number of schools soon after their arrival.

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A Critical Economic Inducement to College Founding: Speculation in Western Lands

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Most of the nineteenth-century multiplication of colleges occurred in the western frontier regions, rather than in the eastern portions of the original colonies. Why were colleges desired in such remote regions, or more precisely, why did people build colleges instead of something else? The productive value of a college seems questionable even for the older eastern regions, but in the West the early presence of colleges seems especially odd, given the lack of other basic improvements. Colleges removed people from the labor force even in periods of labor shortage. The natural environment, including the northern winter, was a very real threat to settlers of the frontier. Surely constructing canals and roads, fencing off fields from ranging livestock, irrigating dry lands and draining swamps, plowing tough virgin prairie grasses, lumbering and transporting lumber to untimbered regions, mining for heating fuel, fire prevention, policing, and efficient communications technologies were

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more pressing needs of frontier settlements than colleges (Bogue, 1963; Gates, 1960, 1973; Shannon, 1945; Taylor, 1951). Medical supplies were scarce and epidemics, such as malaria and small pox, were common in many areas. Finished manufactured goods from the East, including books and other school supplies, were not readily available. Nevertheless, college buildings were big, were expensive to build and maintain, and typically were located on large, valuable acreages near or in towns. 9 In view of these hardships, who wanted colleges?

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When one considers the economics of colleges, one important function of such institutions surely pertained to the provision of occupational skills and cultures to traditional professional groups such as ministers and lawyers. However, the original overproduction of colleges was more a consequence of the role of college founding in the social psychology of land speculation than a result of the proliferation of professional groups. Federal and state governments permitted college founding, some religious cultures encouraged foundings, and the microeconomics of land speculation provided fertile soil for the growth of the activity. Federal Land Policy

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From its inception to 1900, the U.S. federal government was relatively weak in its control of internal territories because powerful interest groups such as the railroads, industrialists, and well-organized ethnic and religious groups dominated politics. Decentralized power was situated in the individual states and in local governments. Still, an important sphere

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of federal influence consisted in the disposal of a vast, conquered frontier (about 1.5 billion acres in 1850). National economic development significantly depended on colonization, agricultural and transportation improvements, and market building in the western frontier. The land policies of the federal government generally encouraged eastern capital investments in the West. Colonization requirements were met through voluntary and various "sponsored" 10 emigrations of the poorer strata of the East westward and by foreign immigrations, often to the same destinations.

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State-supported educational development of the West consisted mainly in the early reservation of one section of land in each western township that could be sold for the funding of public schools. Federal and state administration of the sale of such lands was not stipulated in these land grants; rather, when opportunities seemed optimal, authorized township officials could sell acreages from this section. Abuse and mismanagement of these resources were rampant, so common schools did not always result from the land grants, nor were permanent funds always established for those schools that were established. The second major educational land grants were given to the states for the establishment of "agricultural and industrial" universities (the "land-grant" colleges) in each state. The lands dispersed were mainly western lands and this created much opposition to the Agricultural College Acts (185859, 1862) among western

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farmers who feared the adverse economic repercussions of absentee ownership of lands.11 The largest direct grants of federal lands to private sources were to the railroads from 1850 to 1890. The justification for giving away these lands (ranging from 20- to 80-mile bands along proposed railway routes) to the railroads was that, without efficient transportation, the land in public domain would remain unusable and unsaleable (Carstensen, 1963; Goodrich, 1960).

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For individuals with small holdings, three federal government acts were instrumental in the procurement of lands. The best known of these was the Homestead Act of 1862, which enabled bonified settlers to take legal claim of 160 acres of land for free after some tenure and improvements had been established. The notion that emigrants could easily homestead productive lands, however, is mistaken (Shannon, 1945:5157). Typically, by the time a region became inhabitable, and sometimes in advance of important improvements, those with large holdings had already gained control of all but the most dismal tracts of land (Bogue, 1959; Gates, 1973). In Iowa, for example, 98% of the land east of Des Moines was already privately owned by 1856 (Swierenga, 1968). Another of the federal efforts was the preemption laws of the early nineteenth century.

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These laws were explicit attempts to protect settlers from the encroachments of land speculators who sought to gain legal access to properties that had long been occupied, but not legally owned, by settlers. Finally, in a federal effort to secure a militia, the Military Bounty Act (1812) established a grant of scrip of small acreages of federal lands (in "military tracts"), mostly located in the West, for veterans of the War of 1812, with individuals' land size based on their length of military service (Gates, 1960:65). These land warrants became assignable in the 1850s, at which time much of this land was bought up by absentee owners with large holdings (Carlson, 1951). Town Founding and Colleges

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A variety of groups, ranging from railroad owners to individuals with large and small holdings to eastern speculators, had interests in various types of development of western lands. For ease of presentation, one may break the types of land speculation down into two basic categories: (1) speculation in large undeveloped acreages for agriculture, lumbering, and mining; and (2) speculation in towns, town lots, and smaller adjacent acreages. For college founding, the greatest coalitions of speculative interests centered around the foundings and growth of towns. There was great incentive for holders of undeveloped lands to found towns in or nearby their land holdings, because the location of a town would usually increase the value of such lands to prospective buyers. Beyond this, there was widespread speculation in town lots, the sale of which brought even higher returns on investments. The familiar gridlike pattern of the U.S. rectangular land survey (Johnson, 1976)

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found its counterpart in the equally methodical design of prospective town plats. Many platted towns remained mere "paper" towns, although this did not necessarily mean that the strategy failed as a sales device. Where towns did succeed, the speculative enterprise spread to include the interests of local businessmen, manufacturers, and, ultimately, to all property owners who stood to gain from the inflation in value of their holdings. Even the propertyless classes, which stood to gain nothing more than the prestige of living in a more important town, supported many means of improving the prospects of growth. The great political economist Thorsten Veblen, who knew the land speculation process well from his youth and college experiences in Northfield, Minnesota, commented:
The location of any given town has commonly been determined by collusion between "interested parties" with a view to speculation in real estate, and it continues through its life-history (hitherto) to be managed as a real

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Page 89 estate "proposition." Its municipal affairs, its civic pride, its community interest, converge upon its real estate values, which are invariably of a speculative character, and which all its loyal citizens are intent on "booming" and "boosting,"that is to say, lifting still farther off the level of actual ground-values as measured by the uses to which the ground is turned. . . . Real estate is the one community interest that binds the townsmen with a common bond; and it is highly significantperhaps it is pathetic, perhaps admirablethat those inhabitants of the town who have no holdings of real estate and who never hope to have any will commonly also do their little best to inflate the speculative values by adding the clamor of their unpaid chorus to the paid clamor of the professional publicity agents, at the cost of living in the enhanced rentals and prices out of which the expenses of publicity are to be met (Veblen, 1945:14243).

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Competition between neighboring towns was fierce. 12 If one town secured a county seat, a new railway connection, a state institution, or whatever might indicate its ascendancy as the regional center, other towns were quick to mobilize alternative means of showing their promise as boom-towns. College founding was viewed by many of Veblen's "interested parties" as a way to assure town growth. Julian Sturtevant, a member of the "Yale Band" and one of the founders of Jacksonville, Illinois and its Congregational Illinois College, lamented that in the nineteenth century:

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[a] mania for college building, which was the combined result of the prevalent speculation in land and the zeal for denominational aggrandizement had spread all over the state. It was generally believed that one of the surest ways to promote the growth of a young city was to make it the seat of a college. It was easy to appropriate some of the best lots in a new town site to the new university, to ornament the plat with an elegant picture of the buildings "soon to be erected," and to induce the ambitious leaders of some religious body to have a college of its own, to accept a land grant, adopt the institution, and pledge to it the resources of their denomination (Sturtevant, 1896:235).

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The histories of early colleges show numerous cases of colleges that changed their names (sometimes several times) in honor of their most recent benefactors. Frequently, the monetary gifts of individuals were all that saved colleges from financial ruin. There also were scores of individuals who, as trustees or presidents, were instrumental in establishing more than one college; these entrepreneurs frequently were involved in real estate themselves and used the college-founding strategy in their speculative ventures as they moved westward. Whether their colleges

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succeeded or failed, these men moved on, because in the former case, their investments had been realized and, in the latter, they had not only failed to boost the town, but typically had also fallen into disrepute in their communities as a consequence of the failed college. It also was quite common for colleges to merge with other colleges once circumstances in a given town appeared bleak.

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Because successful new towns almost of necessity were located along actual or proposed railroad routes, the planning of colleges frequently went hand-in-hand with the boosting of towns (often by the railroad employees who secured railroad lands, or by the railroads themselves) along these routes. The railroads sometimes were involved directly in the recruitment of colleges to towns along their lines. Towns and colleges that mistakenly anticipated the construction of railroads to their locations invariably floundered. Case Studies of Land-Speculative College Founding I now shall consider a few cases that flesh out with empirical details the general forces I just outlined. The Upper Mississippi Valley was an area of intense college-related land speculation, so it will serve well as a regional focus. 13

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The Upper Mississippi Valley The earliest flowering of colleges in the Upper Mississippi Valley took place in Illinois during the 1830s. The Illinois Military Tract in the western portion of the state, though remote from metropolitan influences, was a region of intense speculative and college-founding activities. Collegiate institutions such as Knox, Monmouth, Geneseo, Bradley, Vashti, St. Bede, Northern Illinois, Augustana, Hedding, Lombard, Galesburg, Carthage, Chaddock, St. Francis, Ansgari, St. Mary, Abingdon, Jubilee, Peoria, Western, Western Illinois, and Rushville attest to the degree of enthusiasm for college founding in this area.

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Knox College was one of these early schools. Upstate New Yorker George W. Gale and his colleagues, founders of Galesburg and Knox College in the early 1830s, purchased 10,000 acres of military tract land along the principal overland route between Chicago and the Mississippi River; this was the eventual route of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railway (Calkins, 1937; Carlson, 1951; Overton, 1941; Webster, 1912:1420).14 With land in hand, Gale's agents returned to New York in a successful effort to recruit colonists, many of whom literally were escorted to the

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"new Mesopotamia." Partly due to the successful college, Galesburg in later years flourished as a regional economic and cultural center (after decades of competition with nearby Knoxville and its Lombard College, ultimately ending with the failure of Lombard and the subsequent transfer of its resources to Knox College). Twenty years after the founding of Knox College, a group of Knox graduates and Galesburg citizens formed the Western Industrial and Scientific Association, a land-purchasing organization, which sold shares in and around Galesburg that would yield to their holders fixed acreages at the rate of 40 acres per $100 share. Out of the holdings of this organization the town of College Springs, Iowa, together with its Amity College were planned, but neither the town nor the college ever materialized.

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Many college founders moved on to more lucrative real estate frontiers regardless of the success or failure of their ventures. John Evans, a cofounder of Northwestern University and Evanston, Illinois was a classic example of this type of speculator. Evans was born on the Ohio frontier in 1814, the son of a Quaker farmer and small businessman. Similar to Josiah Grinnell in Iowa, Evans had substantial experience in the administration of cultural and political institutions. He received an M.D. degree from Lynn Medical College in Cincinnati in 1838, was a superintendent of an insane asylum in Indianapolis from 18451848, then joined the medical faculty at Rush Medical College in Chicago. It was in Chicago that Evans launched a successful career as a politician and collegefounding real estate speculator. In 1850, a group of Methodist church leaders, including Evans (who conveniently had converted by this timeChicago was no center of Quaker culture), Orrington Lunt (a

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notable Chicago businessman), and Grant Goodrich (a prominent Chicago lawyer) led an initiative to found a university that they hoped would become a center for higher education in the Northwest Territory. The resultant institution, Northwestern University, was located north of Chicago on some prime real estate along the Chicago and Northwestern railway. The Evansled investment company acquired substantial adjacent acreage for the founding of a town and the sale of town lots. The college-town venture was quite successful, not just in Evanston where the trustees succeeded in avoiding the taxation of university holdings, but also in Chicago in the acquisition of tax-free properties and the affiliation of legal and medical schools. By 1862, Evans was a very wealthy man making over $20,000 per year just on his Chicago real estate, not to mention his Evanston and other dealings (Kelsey, 1969:69). In subsequent years, Evans (a Northwestern University trustee until his

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death in 1897) donated to Northwestern some of his properties in downtown Chicago; we do not know what benefits Evans may have received in return for these gratu-

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ities, but it seems plausible that the tax-free status of colleges was an important incentive to Evans' investments in private higher educational institutions.

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Even while in Chicago, Evans engaged in college founding and land speculation further west in Nebraska. As an organizer of the Oreapolis Company in the late 1850s, Evans helped found the town of Oreapolis and, despite territorial legislation passed in 1858 against unsavory speculative activities in the region, obtained a state charter for not one but three educational institutions for the upstart towna seminary, a biblical institute, and Oreapolis University. The latter institution, the proposed center of Oreapolis culture, received a 30-acre land grant from the Oreapolis Company for a building site, plus one-tenth of the company's lots and other land. Evans spent considerable time in Oreapolis and returned to Illinois seeking settlers, advising them that "the early settlers make the money" (Kelsey, 1969:106107). Evans also had become involved in the usual railway-building speculations of the day; he campaigned in Illinois for a Chicago to Pikes Peak Express that, of course,

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would pass through Oreapolis. Later he campaigned for a Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad that would serve the same town-boosting end. Neither proposal got off the ground and Oreapolis quickly died (Kelsey, 1969:108109).

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Undaunted by the failure of Oreapolis, Evans continued to support railway ventures westward to Colorado. In 1860 he campaigned in Illinois for Lincoln's presidency, hoping to receive the governorship of Nebraska, but he lost out to a competitor in this endeavor; Evans was instead appointed territorial governor of Colorado in 1862 by the victorious Lincoln. In Colorado, Evans speculated in mining lands, was instrumental in founding the Denver and Pacific railway and, once again, founded a collegethe University of Denver. Evans maintained close ties to Northwestern University throughout his years in Colorado as a trustee and college recruiter (the Alumni Record of Northwestern University [1903] shows an inordinate number of Northwestern graduates from the 18701890 period who did administrative work for Colorado mining companies).

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Ethnic colleges were no exception to the basic land-speculative scheme of foundings. Augustana College emerged from the Swedish-Norwegian wing of the Illinois State University in Springfield (no relation to the present Illinois State University in Normal), then, in 1860, moved to Chicago due to conflicts within the Anglo-Protestant-dominated college administration in Springfield (Evjen, 1938). After deliberations about alternative sites, an offer from the Illinois Central Railroad for 1,000 acres of prairie land near Paxton, Illinois at $6 an acre, plus a college site in

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the town, was accepted by the college leadership in 1863. The agreement with the Illinois Central also would provide Augustana with a $1 commission on the first 30,000 acres of Illinois Central land that was sold through a college-affiliated agent. This commission would then drop to $.50 an acre on the next 30,000 acres sold (Bergendoff, 1969:25). There were few Scandinavians in the Paxton area and the expected boom in land sales to immigrants never happened. The college closed in 1870 and the Norwegian and Swedish constituencies moved on to Minneapolis (Augsburg College) and Rock Island, Illinois (Augustana College), respectively, to begin separate institutions in more congenial ethnic environments.

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In the central Illinois town of Bloomington, Jesse Fell was a major speculator and college founder. Fell was a member of Bloomington's elite and was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln and Bloomington's U.S. Supreme Court justice, David Davis. Fell was a trustee of Bloomington's Illinois Wesleyan College, which, at its inception, was operating out of the basement of the local Methodist church (Watson, 1950). When Illinois Wesleyan chose Bloomington as the site for its permanent campus, rather than Fell's proposed site near his farmlands in North Bloomington (later Normal), he promptly resigned his trusteeship at Illinois Wesleyan and devoted his energies to locating the newly appropriated state landgrant institution near his property. In these efforts, Fell and other local supporters lost out (along with several other municipalities) to the nascent town of Urbana (and to the Illinois Central railroad on which the town was platted) in Champaign

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County. Fell and North Bloomington lost out in a "political" decision by the Illinois state legislature, which overlooked the fact that other communities had pledged greater monetary support than Urbana (Marshall, 1956; Solberg, 1968). Fell then set his sights on the founding of the first state normal school (teacher college), an endeavor which finally met his needsthe institution was located where he wanted it in North Bloomington, the school earned national recognition in years to follow as a leader in teacher education, and Fell's name was embellished on an early building as a lasting tribute to this "founding father."

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Iowa College (later Grinnell College) was established in 1846 in Davenport by members of the so-called "Iowa Band," a group of energetic young seminarians from Yale and Andover. Severe financial failures threatened to close the school at Davenport until it was rescued by Josiah Grinnell and his associates. Grinnell had platted a town (Grinnell) along the path of the projected Rock Island Railroad between Iowa City (the first state capital) and Des Moines (the soon-to-be-established state capital). While Grinnell already had planned a college for his town, he seized the opportunity to have the existing institution in Davenport moved westward to

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Grinnell, where he was actively trying to induce the Rock Island Railway to run its lines. Early town plats from the Grinnell College archives indicate that Grinnell and the new college trustees owned considerable parcels of land in and around the proposed town. Grinnell's position in the Iowa state legislature, his friendship with eastern newspaper magnate Horace Greeley (for advertising purposes), and his impeccable social standing as a former Congregationalist minister made him uniquely able to carry off profitable town- and college-founding activities (Holbrook, 1950:13840; Nollen, 1953; Payne, 1938).

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Western College near Shueyville, Iowa was a typical midwestern college facing financial ruin in the mid-1850s. After a failed attempt to generate subscriptions of land from college friends, which would be sold in 6 years at a substantial profit, the trustees of the college resolved ''that Brother Shuey (a priest who held considerable economic interest in the success of the college) be engaged to go back east to borrow $10,000 at a reasonable rate of interest for a term of at least three years for the use of Western College" (Ward, 1911:102). Shuey secured the loan, the money immediately was spent for current operating expenses and overdue debts, and the college still continued on the edge of financial collapse. The loan "remained for years a serious embarrassment to the College and a heavy burden to Father Shuey, who had borrowed the money on his own good name and had become responsible for its payment" (Ward, 1911:102). Poor Father Shuey, of course, held a vested

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interest in the survival of the school, because he was a member of the family that founded Shueyville and that had substantial real estate and commercial holdings adjacent to the college. By the late 1870s, financial difficulties at Western College had reached their peak, forcing the usual ultimate solution to money problems. The college sought out interested towns (i.e., towns that promised the greatest monetary subscriptions, land, etc. to the school), packed up its wares, and moved to Toledo, Iowa where (after a renaming of the school to Leander Clark College in appreciation of yet another benefactor) still more financial disasters eventually closed the institution.

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The state of Iowa had many other college roundings and failures resultant of land-speculative interests. Under the heading of "Necrology," a report published by the U.S. Bureau of Education (Parker, 1893) depicts similar college failures at Humboldt College (Springvale), Algona College (Kossuth), Brooks College, the "Female University" and Mount Ida Female College in Davenport, and Springdale Seminary. 15 Lumbering interests augmented agricultural and town-founding real estate interests in Wisconsin. Lawrence College was founded in the late 1840s when Amos Lawrence, a Boston merchant with large timberland

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holdings in northern Wisconsin, proposed to donate $10,000 and land for a college near De Pere, if the Methodist church could match his donation (Schumann, 1957). After some debate with denominational groups and other northern Wisconsin interest groups, Lawrence agreed on Appleton as a more suitable location for the college, even though the town was further south than he would have liked, given his lumbering interests. Beyond the donation of the college, Lawrence also built a sawmill in Appleton to aid town development and in order to provide a center for processing the timber from his northern logging operations.

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Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell College (later Cornell University) in New York, likewise encouraged lumbering Wisconsin timberlands. Cornell's Wisconsin lands were gained through the selection of Cornell College as New York's land-grant university. Land grants from the Morrill Bill usually were located in undeveloped western regions. Contrary to popular thought, land-grant universities were not always built from scratch; in a number of cases, such as Cornell, land grants were given to existing denominational colleges. The State Land-Grant Colleges

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Although the overall influence of land-grant colleges and universities (state universities) on nineteenth-century U.S. higher education (e.g., for growth in enrollments or for secularization of higher education) is greatly exaggerated in the popular imagination, these institutions were extremely significant in debates over the disposal of land in the public domain. 16 The landgrant colleges were tied to land speculation because (1) debates over the Agricultural College Acts were informed by regional competition for western land grants, (2) subsequent debates over the content of instruction at land-grant colleges partly was a residue of the winners and losers in the ultimate passing of the Agricultural College Act in 1862, (3) the land-grant colleges were financed by the sales of college-owned western lands, and (4) the location of land-grant colleges was influenced by the same town-boosting strategies and political influence as other types of college founding.

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The Agricultural College Bills of 18581859 and 1862 were extensions of long-standing debates about how the federal government would divide western lands among the states. Some states favored western land grants to the states for the establishment of cultural institutions within their boundaries; the states would become absentee owners and sellers of western lands. Other states favored reservation of the public domain lands for actual settlers. An example of the state landgrant disposal method was the unsuccessful Dix Bill of 1854, which proposed grants of

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10,000,000 acres of western lands to the states, for the construction of insane asylums, based on a ratio of geographical area and numbers of congressmen. The Dix Bill failed as result of opposition in the West, where sentiments ran strong against the financing of eastern institutions with western land sales.

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The original Agricultural College Bill of 18581859 specified that each state would be granted 20,000 acres of public land for each of their federal senators and representatives. These grants would be used for the establishment of state agricultural colleges. The bill gained full support from New England (280 in the House and 90 in the Senate) and won the Middle States by a margin of 3816 in the House and 40 in the Senate. The bill ran into opposition in the West, where old and newer publicland states split the vote. Resentment of the adverse effects of land speculation on basic improvements was common in these regions. The Old South opposed the bill 4112 in the House and 74 in the Senate, while new southern public-land states unanimously voted against the bill in the House (170) and Senate (100). The Old South viewed federal land grants to the states as a threat to the Constitution and a probable vehicle for further Northern oppression of the South. The original bill

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won a narrow 105100 margin in the House and a 2522 Senate win, but President Buchanan vetoed the Bill. Under the same sponsorship as before, the Agricultural College Act was reintroduced to Congress in 1862 with an increase to 30,000 acres per senator and representative. With the Civil War negating Southern opposition to the bill, passage was easy this time (9125 in the House and 327 in the Senate). The lowered number of votes reflects western recognition of the inevitability of the eastern-sponsored bill. The Old Northwest, especially Illinois and Indiana, accounted for 17 of 25 votes against the bill, owing to long-standing animosity over land-speculation fraud and spoilage. For the states that opposed the bill, the passage of the Homestead Act in the same year was a victory, but the Agricultural College Act was a defeat.

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The Agricultural College Act of 1862, and the grant-acceptance/college-establishment deadlines specified in the Agricultural College Acts of 1864 and 1866, faced state legislatures with decisions about when to accept land grants, how to distribute lands among colleges, and where to establish agricultural-mechanical universities (Andrews, 1918; Ross, 1942; True, 1929). Some states established brand new universities (the usual western pattern), while many others transformed an existing liberal arts college into a land-grant institution (the typical eastern solution, e.g., at Cornell, Brown, Yale, Rutgers, Dartmouth, Amherst, Delaware, and Clemson). 17 In the post-Civil War South, some states established segre-

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gated white and "colored" institutions (e.g., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Hampton Institute in Virginia, or Mississippi College and Alcorn College in Mississippi).

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Although no state distributed the grants over more than two institutions (often racially segregated), sometimes this idea was debated. In Illinois, for example, prior to the much contested selection of Champaign as a site for a new university, a debate ensued about a proposed distribution of the funds from land sales among existing private institutions. The proponents of distribution among existing colleges were, of course, the presidents and trustees of existing schools who desperately needed the land-grant funds to save or strengthen their colleges. Jonathan Turner, a former professor at Illinois College in Jacksonville and an influential progenitor of the Morrill Act, unsuccessfully fought in the legislature to append Illinois' land-grant institution to Illinois College. Turner, writing in the mid-1860s, was opposed to distribution of the land grant on grounds that many existing colleges were inept at managing funds:

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We need no further proof of the utter incapacity of these gentlemen to manage these funds than their own published reports give us. . . . Just look at it: More than a round hundred corporators, gathered promiscuously, by a sort of accidental drag-net, from all classes, professions, and conditions in life, without the least possible regard to their knowledge of educational interests; and set to do what? Why, simply to dole out and watch the miserable pittance of two thousand dollars a year, distributed among some twenty or more rival colleges agreed to nothing but a present want of funds (Frank, 1979:72).

State legislators selected Champaign as the site for the University of Illinois following a protracted campaign by various Illinois community and business leaders to secure the institution at various locations through offering legislators legitimate and unsavory incentives (Solberg, 1968).

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Differential successes in the selection and disposal of Morrill Act lands were evident. These differences sometimes shaped the early, and even later, financial strength and prestige of land-grant colleges. Some schools located their lands in regions where speculative values were realized, while others selected relatively worthless acreages (Andrews, 1918; Gates, 1943). Some schools sold their lands very quickly and failed to realize the profits that more patient investors enjoyed. Without a doubt, the most atrocious abuse of land grants occurred in Rhode Island (Gates, 1943:3641). The Rhode Island state legislature accepted 120,000 acres in scrip in 1863, a year after the passage of the

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Agricultural College Act. The legislature turned the scrip over to Brown University, a private institution. The Brown University trustees engaged Horace T. Love as an agent who would select land in Kansas for the scrip. In 1863, Love and Brown president Barnas Sears spent a month in Kansas selecting acreages that the university would sell off as early as possible. They located their entries near the proposed route of the Atchison and Pikes Peak Railway, which was a wise choice. However, Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas was an organizer of the railway and the town of Atchison; Pomeroy, through maneuverings in Washington, effectively blocked the Brown University entries until 1864. By early 1865, Brown officials had fought through the hurdles the railway had created and decided to sell all its lands and unlocated scrip at whatever price. The land and scrip were sold for $50,000, which was an average of $.42 an acrethe lowest return gained by any state. The

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buyer of the Brown lands and scrip was none other than Horace T. Love, the man who made the initial selections! In the following 2 years, he sold the majority of his land and scrip to a Kansas real estate partnership at an average of $.96 an acre, while selling the rest at an average of $.61 an acre. There is no indication that Love's profits ever made their way back to the Brown University endowment. In 1888, the Rhode Island state legislature moved to establish a separate state agricultural school at Kingston. Brown University fought a legal battle for subsequent land-grant institution benefits until 1904, when under the influence of a similar case between Yale University and the state agricultural college at Storrs, Connecticut, Brown accepted a state legislature offer of $40,000 in return for a relinquishment of claims to agricultural college grants (Andrews, 1918:4344).

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By contrast to Brown University, the University of Illinois disposed of its lands in a most judicious manner (Gates, 1943:4248). Illinois received 480,000 acres of scrip through the Agricultural College Act, but due to debates over the location of the university in Urbana, only began deliberations over the disposal of the scrip in 1867. In 1867, the trustees sold 380,000 acres at an average price of $.66 an acre. In the following 5 years, 75,000 acres of scrip was sold at rates up to $1 an acre, bringing the average yield up to $.70 an acre. The revenues from these sales were invested in county bonds that brought 10% interest. With the remaining scrip, the university entered prairie lands in Minnesota and Nebraska, which university representatives personally inspected for speculative value. The returns on sales of these lands, which were leased profitably until the late 1880s, averaged about $13 an acre.

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As Gates (1943) argues, the Illinois land-disposal policy served the immediate financial needs of the institution in the 1860s and 1870s. The trustees did not settle for ridiculously low prices in the early years, nor

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did they fail to purchase some land of their own for long-term speculative purposes. Even though Illinois received slightly more money on the sale of the lands it entered and held than on the scrip it sold in the 1860s and 1870s, the early sales of scrip saved the university from the costly taxes and administrative expenses (e.g., policing lands for squatters and timber thieves) associated with the land some schools held. College Founding and Others Forms of Town Boosting

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How prevalent was the practice of land-speculative college founding? Was it really crucial for U.S. educational expansion? Although there are no comprehensive data available on the land speculative origins of colleges, miscellaneous histories of colleges show this practice to be a very common incentive not just for schools that failed, but also for survivor colleges. Keep in mind that all the institutions established through lands granted individual states by the Morrill Act (1862) also were influenced by land-speculative interests. When one adds to this the many private institutions and failed schools about which little is known, the list becomes quite long.

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Still, educational activity was not the only cultural initiative of western communities. The western towns, especially the Yankee settlements, were replete with cultural institutions. Doyle's (1978) study of Jacksonville, Illinois/ Illinois College and Calkins' (1937) account of Galesburg, Illinois/Knox College depict two such frontier communities, each filled with cultural institutions. 18 The construction and sustenance of churches, parsonages, and cemeteries was even more extravagant than the college building. In architectural grandeur, the church was second only to the college and, of course, church building was more widespread. The fact that a light rain might virtually disable transportation in a town that lacked plank roads did not prohibit the establishment of separate wooden churches for every denomination. Fraternal organizations with meeting halls, elaborate hotels serving mainly social functions, and theaters also were commonplace features of

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institutionally complete communities (Boorstin, 1973). Some sought-after institutions at least offered employment opportunities, accessibility to political power, and tax revenues. The locations of county seats and state capitals were sought after by developed towns, as were statesponsored orphanages, insane asylums, hospitals, prisons, alms houses, and so on that housed "troublesome" individuals and groups. Colleges clearly were not alone among other apparently dispensable organizations in the less developed regions of the United States. Did college founding really "work" as a speculative venture? Cer-

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tainly, the ultimate success of a town would be a poor measure of whether it in fact did "work," because the original promoters even of failed towns often benefited from "paper" or real colleges. It also is hard to sort out the independent effects of simultaneously employed boosting strategies. Where a college was the sole source of speculative boosting (i.e., in the absence of transportation and other amenities), towns usually died and their colleges either moved or became defunct. There is no reason to believe that colleges worked any better than other ploys; often college founding worked in conjunction with the founding of a state institution, public school, church, or other institution. I mentioned earlier that the hardships of frontier life made the presence of cultural institutions seem rather odd. Even though colleges and other cultural institutions were expensive luxuries, they were often cheaper and more easily acquired mechanisms for promoting towns than the actual

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establishment of solid economic and political bases in agricultural improvements, transportation, industry, county seats, state institutions, and so on. The lands donated to the colleges typically were not yet worth much. Financing could be supplied partly by sources outside the community, that is, by the wider church affiliation, student tuitions (including out-of-town students who would spend money in town), and ''pledges" of individuals and groups, which could be withdrawn with impunity whether the college succeeded or not. Colleges were not only easily started, they also were low-risk investments with potentially bountiful returns. Conclusion: Patterns of Institutional Proliferation and Enrollments

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If one traces the history of college foundings through the nineteenth century, interesting trends emerge. Most obvious is the movement of new college foundings westward over time, together with the real estate frontier. The exception to this trend was the coastal Pacific Northwest (e.g., Reed College in Oregon), which was settled early by New England groups. Other patterns are discernible in quantitative data. It will be useful to reexamine the historical demographics presented in Chapter 1.

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While the total number of new college foundings demonstrated fairly consistent growth up to 1890, there were some interesting variations by decade and by type of school. 19 The period from 1820 to 1840 was one of significant growth of institutions, first in the mid-East, then in the Old Northwest. Speculation in lands in these regions was at its apex just prior to the Panic of 1837, which was brought on partly because of rampant land speculation (McGrane, 1924:4370). It is probable that college found-

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ing continued as a last-gasp effort to increase land values for several years following the Panic, but the 1840s clearly were a time of retrenchment in college foundings and, as a consequence of this fact, in enrollments as well. Burke's data in Table 1.4 indicate that liberal arts college foundings fell from 56 in the 1830s to 42 in the 1840s, while their enrollments increased only from 8,328 in 1840 to 9,931 in 1850. Theological school enrollments were virtually the same for 1840 and 1850. Figures for legal and medical school foundings are not available, but their enrollments did not suffer. By the 1850s, recovery was completenew foundings of liberal arts colleges jumped to 88 in this decade and enrollments grew from 9,931 in 1850 to 16,600 in 1860. Theological enrollments also recovered from 1,008 in 1850 to 1,553 in 1860. This general pattern of 1840s stability and 1850s growth is corroborated by Tewksberry's (1932:16) data and by the early investigations of Dexter and

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Cubberley, both cited in Tewksberry. The Panic of 1857 also had a significant relationship with land-speculation (Van Vleck, 1943:2834), but there is little evidence that this panic had enduring effects on either new college foundings or college enrollments. For the period 18601870, there are no data on new college foundings, but the Civil War does not appear to have had lasting effects on the overall enrollments in U.S. higher education. The exceptions to this point would be in wartorn regions and among medical students, who may have been depleted by disproportionate causualty rates in military service. Burke's data show (Table 1.3) large increases in the enrollments of normal school students, theological students, technical students, and women. 20 I think it probable that the enrollment growth that we observe is due largely to the growth of new schools (including women's colleges, normal schools, and technical institutes).

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Between 1870 and 1880, new college foundings increased 44%, while enrollments grew 123% (Table 1.1). Speculation in western lands and railways was widespread following the Civil War and up to the Panic of 1873. It is difficult to ascertain when the new college foundings happened, but it is probable that the majority of new colleges were established in the glory years of railway and land speculation preceding the panic. Touched off by the failure of Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific railroad venture and his investment bank, popular distrust of banks and other financial institutions followed, resulting in many withdrawals of deposits, the failures of numerous banks, and business closings. The depression that followed was accompanied by a significant increase in college enrollments, especially in technical, normal, and medical programs, but also in liberal arts colleges (see Table 1.3). Students flocked to the colleges rather than to the

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labor market over the next few years. These student

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cohorts were enough to keep colleges on a relatively firm financial footing for almost a decade.

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By the early 1880s, the colleges had ridden the tide of the 1870s depression as far as it would carry them. Students were going more directly into the labor market and new schools continued to be founded (a 23.1% increase from 1880 to 1890). 21 The great many new college foundings in the 1870s, coupled with new schools in the 1880s, resulted in overextension of higher educational institutions; there were too many schools and too few students. Table 1.1 shows that the mean enrollment in U.S. higher educational institutions had grown only 10% between 1880 and 1890, as opposed to 54.8% in the preceding decade. Burke's data for the same period (Table 1.3) indicate that slowed rates of enrollment growth were fairly common across various types of colleges, but particularly hard hit were normal, technical, and women's colleges, all of which were newer institutions that were established in the 1870s.

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Again, in Table 1.3, swift recovery of enrollments was underway in the 1890s in all but theological, technical, and women's schools. The Panic of 1893 does not appear to have had the same dramatic effects on enrollment growth as did the 1873 crisis; in fact, Table 1.2 shows that from 1895 to 1896, and again from 1897 to 1898, the number of students in liberal arts (college) programs per 1 million in the U.S. population fell (1,158 to 1,142 for 18951896) or remained constant (18971898). Enrollments began to increase in 1887 and continued to do so at a fairly even pace through the 1890s (see Table 1.3, which shows that liberal arts enrollments per 1 million in the population jumped from 688 in 1887 to 729 in 1888). Liberal arts, legal, medical, and normal schools all experienced tremendous growth in the 1890s. These enrollments also represented a significant jump in the percentage of the eligible age group that was enrolled in colleges. More interesting is the fact

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that these steady increases in enrollments took place in individual schools. Table 1.1 shows that there were about the same number of higher educational institutions in 1900 as there were in 1890, yet the overall mean enrollment in colleges shot up 55% (from 157 to 244). The pattern for 1900 to 1910 was very similar to that of the previous decade. Again, the total number of institutions remained stable, enrollments increased by 53%, and the number enrolled as a percentage of the persons aged 18 to 21 climbed from 4.01% to 5.12%. Clearly, something other than new college foundings was producing enrollment expansion after 1890. (I shall argue in Chapter 6 that labor market linkages were crucial.) Beginning in the late 1910s, and culminating in the 1920s, a new wave of college foundings occurred. New college foundings increased 15% from 1910 to 1920 and 54% from 1920 to 1930. The largest single category of

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new college foundings was in junior colleges, which were nonexistent in 1910 but numbered 277 in 1930. Junior colleges had very low enrollments (a mean of 202 in 1930), which accounts for the national slowdown in mean enrollment growth between 1920 and 1930. Nevertheless, the period from 1910 to 1930 was one of tremendous enrollment expansion in other institutions. Table 1.1 shows that the number of people enrolled in higher education as a percentage of persons aged 18 to 21 grew from 5.12% in 1910 to 8.20% in 1920 to 12.95% in 1930. Once again, it was not new college foundings that produced such growth; enrollment increases over this period were concentrated in existing colleges.

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I do not wish to say that land-speculative college founding ceased to be of significance for colleges after 1890, because decisions about the locations of new and relocated schools are almost always informed by such interests. 22 Rather, my point is that after 1890 the landspeculative basis for educational growth ceased to be a very important determinant of system growth, even though it had established an institutional network that facilitated subsequent enrollment growth.

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The discussion of enrollment trends thus far has concentrated on the interaction of college foundings and enrollments. One notable period of slowed enrollment growth was the 1880s, although high rates of growth ensued in the 1890s and continued thereafter. The pattern of consolidated growth that emerges in the 1890s is one of the most significant facts of U.S. higher educational history. In the next chapter, I shall examine in greater detail the forces internal and external to the colleges that effected a revolution in the content and structure of U.S. educational institutions after 1890 and, thereby, influenced rates of enrollment in a newly stratified educational system.

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5 The Formation of a College-Dominated Educational System, 18801930

Most of the participants in U.S. education today take for granted the standardized structure of the educational system, along with the hierarchical sequence of movements through various types of institutions (elementary school, high school, college, and graduate or professional schools). The purpose of this chapter is to examine historical forces which made American education highly uniform at stratified levels.

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During the 1880s, enrollment growth rates in U.S. higher education were much slower than in the 1870s; in fact, the 1880s represented the slowest growth rate of any decade in the entire 1800 to 1930 period. While one might expect that growth rates would reach ceilings set by the sheer number of operating higher educational institutions, it is curious that growth rates were quite high in the decades immediately preceding and following the 1880s. There is good reason to believe that the number of existing colleges was sufficient to support higher rates of enrollment growth in the 1880s, but that other factors slowed enrollment growth.

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The 1880s were a pivotal juncture in the expansion of U.S. higher education because the potential existed at this time for major limitations of higher educational growth. Many colleges still were struggling; the failure of these institutions could have resulted in a major centralization of higher education. This centralization would have taken place in schools that could not have sustained the tremendous enrollment growth that survivor schools in fact realized over the following few decades.

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The key to renewed rates of enrollment growth in the 1890s and thereafter rested (1) in remarkably sudden changes in the internal structure of colleges and in their relationship to recruitment needs of some employers, and (2) in the placement of competitor institutions in service roles to more powerful institutions in an educational system. This chapter is organized around a discussion of these two great transformations in American higher education.

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A Pivotal Juncture: Enrollments and Reforms in the 1880s

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Following the economic troubles of the 1840s, U.S. liberal arts programs experienced steady enrollment growth in the 1850s and 1860s. 1 The 1870s accentuated this growth trajectory. By all measures (with the exception of women's colleges, which were Jew in number and, in many cases, already were merged with men's institutions), the years from 1873 to about 1880 were an educational boom period. Table 1.1 indicates that overall enrollments increased 123% in the 1870s. Despite a 44% increase in the number of higher educational institutions in the 1870s, mean enrollments also increased 55%. This figure suggests that enrollment growth was distributed across numerous types of institutions, rather than limited to liberal arts colleges.2 Burke's data (Table 1.3) show that liberal arts enrollments increased by 43%, but that even greater increases occurred in professional and technical institutions (law 50%, medicine 100%, theology 67%, normal 310%, and technical

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125%). In 1870, liberal arts enrollments (excluding women's colleges) constituted about 47% of overall enrollments, whereas by 1880 liberal arts enrollments were around 30% of total enrollments. By 1880, professional education had rebounded from the doldrums of the Jacksonian period. Although medical education was a significant part of this movement, the growth of normal schools was the most striking aspect of the 1870s educational boom. It is likely that most of these normal school students went on to teach in common schools, although the high school movement had begun by this point and would gain momentum in the 1890s. Wiebe (1967:12) summarized the causes and consequences of the depression of the 1870s:

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An economy buoyed by extravagant railroad construction sank abruptly when further expansion could no longer attract long-term investments. Bankers such as the celebrated Jay Cooke had precipitated the panic of 1873 by their use of short-term credits to keep afloat railroad promotions which foreign investors were scorning, and when no European money materialized to rescue them, those who had lived dangerously died as desperately. . . . The same Jailing prices that had deterred investors facilitated commerce, as migrants filled the land along the new railroad lines and enterprising businessmen, adequately supplied with those short-term credits which had lured Cooke into disaster, rushed to exploit the new opportunities in trade. While overbuilding the railroads had brought depression, it had created a commercial reservoir which for years afterward sustained much of the economy, including the railroads themselves.

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The Panic of 1873 and its 6-year aftermath of depression may have benefited college enrollments up to about 1880. The "commercial reservoir" spoken of by Weibe doubtless was concentrated in urban market centers and larger rural towns, such as county seats. Colleges located in market centers lured many students in the 1870s and continued to grow in the 1880s, perhaps because they had gained some early success in placing students in urban commercial and financial enterprises. Still, urban schools were not yet the primary loci of overall college enrollments; scattered, small, rural colleges enrolled more students. In smaller cities and towns, the prevailing ideology of promoting "expansion" and ''opportunity" was shaken by the depression; much popular distrust of the federal government and big business followed. In opposition to the perceived failures of adventurous big enterprises, the virtues of small town

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America were extolled by those parties most affected by the depression. 3 College liberal arts department enrollments immediately shot up after the Panic of 1873. At Northwestern University near Chicago, the increase in enrollments went from 145 in 18721873 to 275 in 18731874; tiny Luther College in Iowa grew from 44 students in 1872 to 84 in 1878. Retention rates of liberal arts college cohorts were very good in most institutions, so the influx of students during the later depression years maintained the enrollments at most schools up to 1880 or slightly later. Some of the 1870s enrollment increases came as a consequence of the establishment of land-grant colleges during this period, but the role of these schools should not be exaggerated, as they were few in number and, at this point in time, had student populations not much larger than the student bodies at the hundreds of private denominational colleges.

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The national rate of enrollment increases slowed down in the 1880s. The rate of overall enrollment increase over this period was only 35%, down from 123% in the preceding decade. Table 1.3 indicates that the slowed growth was concentrated in several types of higher education. In liberal arts colleges, which accounted for about half of overall higher educational enrollments, the rate of decennial enrollment growth fell from 43% in the 1870s to 33% in the 1880s. The rate of normal school growth was only 10%, down from 310% in the 1870s; technical school enrollments were the same in 1880 as in 1890; law school enrollment fell from 50% to 33%; medical school growth dropped from 100% to 57%; theological school growth lowered from 67% to 40%. Only women's colleges registered increased rates of growth, from zero growth in the 1870s to a modest 8% growth rate during the 1880s.

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Among liberal arts colleges, leveling or decreasing enrollment growth was less pronounced for newer schools (including many land-grant col-

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leges) that had not yet tapped various recruitment bases by 1880, for urban institutions, and for elite schools. Consider the enrollment pattern in Illinois from 1872 to 1890, which is shown in Table 5.1. One finds in Illinois a fairly typical casewhere, prior to 1900, private colleges in small cities and towns accounted for a greater proportion of liberal arts enrollments than did public and urban institutions. Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois was a fairly elite, Methodist school that, through its trustees and "friends," was closely tied to influential groups in urban Chicago. The college maintained a preparatory academy (a secondary school) until the 1910s. By 1890, Northwestern had also established in Chicago affiliate professional schools in medicine, law, pharmacy, and dentistry (Williamson & Wild, 1976). Between 1872 and 1880, Northwestern increased its college enrollments by 25%, while simultaneously reducing the proportion of preparatory academy

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to overall enrollments from 68% to 51%. Unlike most institutions, Northwestern also increased its college enrollments by 39% in the 1880s. Northwestern's ability to increase college enrollments partly was a consequence of successful efforts to increase the proportion of preparatory academy to overall enrollment from 51% to 70% (although many schools were able to effect significant growth of preparatory departments without corresponding increases in college department enrollments). Northwestern really did not suffer the crisis of the 1880s as severely as did other schools because their abundant resources and ties to professional education stemmed financial problems and procured sufficient student enrollments.

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The University of Illinois (Illinois Industrial University) in Urbana had high enrollments at its inception in 1867 as a low-cost, land-grant university. Surprisingly, this institution experienced a 35% reduction in the number of college department enrollments between 1872 and 1880. The likely reason was the exodus of numerous farmers' sons in the years following 1873, partly as a result of their skepticism about the "impractical" classical curriculum of the school (together with the school's unwillingness to schedule terms in accordance with planting and harvest seasons) and partly because they were needed at home in the poor economic and farming times of the 1870s. The easing of economic constraints, coupled with free tuition, enabled a swift recovery of enrollments (a 35% increase from 1880 to 1890) in the 1880s. The University of Illinois always made its preparatory department subsidiary to the college and gradually phased out the preparatory department

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altogether (as did other schools later) in favor of public high school recruitment practices. Unlike Northwestern University, the University of Illinois did not establish legal and medical school affiliations until the early 1900s, perhaps due to the absence of a set of separate, existing professional schools in

TABLE 5.1 Illinois Enrollments in College and Preparatory Departments, Schools 1872 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 Northwestern University: College decennial % change Preparatory Prep. as % of total
TOTAL

146 306 67.7 452 400 ? ? 400

183 +25 191 51.1 374 259 35 131 33.6 390

University of Illinois: College decennial % change Preparatory Prep. as % of total

TOTAL

University of Chicago: College decennial % change Preparatory Prep. as % of total

TOTAL

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Other Colleges: College decennial % change Preparatory Prep. as % of total

TOTAL

902 539 37.4 1,441 1,448

1,898 +110 2,425 56.1 4,323

TOTAL: College decennial % change Preparatory Prep. as % of total

2,340 +62 845 2,839 36.9 54.8 TOTAL 2,291 5,181 Note: Comprehensive statistics prior to 1872 are unavailable programs leading to the bachelor of arts and similar degrees. T fessional departments, e.g., engineering, law, medicine, theolo for all years (especially for early years) due to missing inform "University of Chicago" refers to the ''new" institution founde included in the 18721880 figures for "other colleges." Sources: U.S. Bureau of Education, Reports of the Commissio or, Reports of the Commissioner, 19021922.

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downstate Urbana (Solberg, 1968:26163). Rather, it was engineering education (not agriculture) that flourished at the University of Illinois and at many other land-grant universities in the late nineteenth century (Solberg, 1968:1056;25461).

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A very different picture of the 1880s emerges when we consider other colleges in Illinois. Overall, these schools (which enrolled 77% of all liberal arts college students in 1880) were beset with a 7% decrease in enrollments from 1880 to 1890, while their preparatory departments increased only 9% in the same period; overall enrollments in these schools (most of which lacked affiliated professional departments) were about the same in 1880 and 1890. 4 Five schoolsKnox College, Lombard University, Illinois Wesleyan University, St. Ignatius College (later Loyola University), and Augustana Collegefor various reasons recorded significant enrollment increases during the 1880s, but 16 others lost students (USBE, 1880; 1890).5

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In the 1890s, the national rate of enrollment growth also displayed large increases. In professional schools, the most conspicuous growth occurred in the nation's few law schools. These institutions increased their enrollments by 225%. In medical schools, the increase was 123%. Modest growth occurred in theological, technical, and women's schools (14%, 20%, and 23%, respectively). Liberal arts enrollments increased by 86% and normal school enrollments increased by 69%. State universities and elite urban schools accounted for a disproportionate amount of the overall growth in enrollments in the 1890s, as they had in the 1880s. The successes of the big schools cut into the recruitment bases of smaller colleges that were located in close proximity to larger schools. Some smaller schools actually began to lose enrollments in the 1890s, but many others held steady or increased their enrollments and thereby emerged as locally

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"elite," or at least financially stable, small colleges. Causes of Slowed Enrollment Growth Slowed enrollment growth in the 1880s varied from one institution to the next, but three primary causes of slowed growth can be identified, each bearing directly on the financial solvencies of schools. First, the content of liberal arts higher education. Student demand for higher education was less in the 1880s than in the 1870s; the colleges of the 1880s were not ideologically suited to the labor markets students aspired to enter or to employers' perceptions about good recruitment centers. Second, the colleges were constrained by financial problems inherited from earlier years. Finally, competition with other institutions for student enroll-

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ments, including newly emerging public high schools, exacerbated the other problems.

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Colleges generally were perceived by students and parents as either providers of job skills for an emerging commercial economy or simply as "safe havens" in a period of uncertainty about careers. As Scott (1970) has shown, many farmers in the late nineteenth century also began to view education, particularly in the new landgrant colleges, favorably as a possible provider of skills germane to agricultural production and marketing. Unfortunately, in the minds of the students who flocked to colleges in the 1870s searching for job skills, most schools offered very little instruction that could convince students they were gaining job skills. Worse yet, the colleges offered curricula that hardly made any pretense to that effect. Apart from a handful of innovative institutions, most colleges of the 1870s and early 1880s held steadfast to classical, prescribed curricula. The lean years of the 1870s depression, if anything, had entrenched even further the traditional, localized, and harsh

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disciplinarian nature of much collegiate instruction (Rudolph, 1962:68109; Veysey, 1965:2156). The fact that colleges made few attempts to show linkages to entry into emerging occupations, coupled with students' commonsense knowledge of the comparable success rates of their noncollege-educated peers in securing a similar range of potential jobs, discouraged the interpersonal communication process among friends and families that ultimately produced new cohorts of students.

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Unsuccessful financial management, preceding and during the period of enrollment increases in the 1870s, was another reason for falling enrollment growth rates in the 1880s (Johnson, 1972; Rudolph, 1962:177200). The new tuition incomes of the 1870s only postponed the financial problems that were the inevitable consequence of the expansive visions and stop-gap measures of previous years. In some cases, new tuition income was invested in the same expansionist visions that prevailed in the early nineteenth century. Many schools were in serious debt prior to the 1870s growth spurt. The colleges that were appendages of religious organizations often were extended credits that overtly pecuniary organizations were denied. College debts in the 1880s accrued from high-interest loans from banks (especially eastern banks) or from eastern education societies, local construction debts, heating fuel advances, rents due, accumulated unpaid salaries to faculty, and so on.

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I discussed in Chapter 4 the land-speculative basis of American college foundings. By the 1880s, most colleges founded in the first half of the nineteenth century had long since exhausted the funds resultant of real estate sales. Early land speculation itself weakened many colleges by the 1880s. Furthermore, competition from newly established schools

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continued into the 1870s and 1880s, thereby sapping away the recruitment bases of many institutions (land-grant universities and normal schools were established in great numbers in the 1870s, but many of these institutions posed little threat to older institutions until the 1880s, when 1870s enrollment growth rates slowed). New college foundings in the 1880s increased 23% over the total number of institutions that existed at the beginning of the decade (see Table 4.1).

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Another common financial problem involved students who attended colleges free with "perpetual tuition scholarships" that had been previously purchased by relatives. 6 Such scholarships entitled the original buyer and his or her descendants to one tuition remission per term forever. From 1835 to 1860, this scheme was used widely by traveling sales agents hired to save failing colleges. The scholarships sold for considerably more than ordinary yearly tuitions ($500 on average), so the plan did, in some cases, solve the immediate financial difficulties of schools. However, the long-term financial consequences of perpetual scholarships were predictably disastrous. Lafayette College in Pennsylvania was a case in point:

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The theory behind Lafayette's campaign of 185054 was that the funds would be used to endow faculty salaries. . . . The Lafayette campaign netted $101,000 in pledges, of which at least $67,000 never went into the proposed endowment of faculty salaries. Thirty-one thousand dollars was never collected; fourteen thousand went toward the payment of old debts; three thousand went to the agents; two thousand dollars was absorbed by vital repairs on college buildings; five thousand dollars was consumed immediately by current salaries, six thousand for other current expenses. Slightly less than a third of the sum pledged remained for endowment investment (Rudolph, 1962:192).

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Depauw University in Indiana later circumvented their problem of free-tuition students by switching to a policy of universal free tuitions; the lost money was recouped through increases in charges for "fees." Denison University in Ohio eventually, in 1910, began buying back their perpetual scholarships (Rudolph, 1962:192). In most cases, if the colleges benefited at all from the perpetual-scholarship strategy, it was only from student-housing revenues (however, cheaper student housing often was available in private households in exchange for student services).

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Part of the reason students did not enroll in colleges was that American public high schools offered cheaper alternative education in more and more regions. Many Americans viewed the public high schools as institutions equal in status to colleges (especially less prestigious colleges). These high schools often were spawned by the same economic

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development interests (boosterism) that produced so many colleges in earlier years. In most states, the first public high schools were established prior to compulsory attendance legislation, although such legislation considerably widened the geographical scope of late nineteenth-century secondary education (Katz, 1971:345). In 1850, there were only around 60 public high schools in the nation; in 1860, 325; in 1870, 800; in 1880, 1,200. Private secondary "academies," most of which were affiliated with Protestant churches and colleges, were far more numerous. By 1890, there were 2,526 high schools widely dispersed across the country (Wesley, 1957:60). Public high schools significantly cut into U.S. college recruitment bases by the 1880s. In 1871, there were 80,000 public high school students in the country, compared to about 52,000 students in nonpreparatory departments of colleges, universities, and professional schools. By 1880, the number of public high

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school students had increased to 110,000 (up 38%), whereas higher educational enrollments grew to 116,000 (up 123%). The balance of public high school to college and professional school students shifted to the high schools by 1890, when there were 203,000 public high school students and 157,000 students in various types of higher education (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1961). However, by that time a movement was well underway that soon would make public high school education subordinate and preparatory to collegiate education. As Katz (1971:423) points out, the nineteenthcentury public high school was a middle-class institution:

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[T]he schools did offer some advantages to boys in search of white-collar work. Unquestionably, they served girls in search of teaching jobs, and female students generally far outnumbered male. However, contrary to popular belief, in its early history the high school was not popular with the working class, which frequently viewed it as a class institution irrelevant to its own aspirations. . . . It was wealthy, prestigious community leaders concerned with economic development and social integration, as well as middle-class parents concerned with mobility and educational expense, who formed the nucleus of high school promoters.

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The clientele and staff of many public high schools looked upon their institutions as "people's colleges," which were the culmination of common school education. Many high school administrators and much of the public envisioned the public high schools as a separate educational system. The high schools were legitimate competitors for the pool of students colleges sought as recruits to their secondary academy departments (Wesley, 1957:66). In contrast to most colleges, the high schools boasted curricula that purported a relation to occupational preparation,

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particularly in industrial, engineering, and business education. The high schools also gave liberal arts preparation for entry to less prestigious professional schools. Only the most reputable professional schools were affiliated with universities in the 1880s. Most professional schools only required a common school education for entry, although a college-preparatory (as opposed to vocational) degree from an elite high school (normally defined by professional school personnel in terms of the ethnic distribution and economic class of the student body and staff) was becoming a prerequisite to entry to a few professional schools (Labaree, 1988).

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The leveling and occasional decline of enrollment growth at colleges in the 1880s was overcome by many colleges in the 1890s. The causes of accelerated growth may be understood partly in terms of the internal reforms that colleges made in response to changes in the external environments of higher education. One important internal change involved restructuring curricula in order to present to students and employers images of the practical and, perhaps more importantly, scientific nature of collegiate learning. In Chapter 3, I suggested reasons why particular bureaucratic and professional employers found such images attractive at that point in time; my attention in what follows will focus on how such curricula originally enticed students to enroll in colleges. A second reform involved introducing a more relaxed "social life" into collegiate experience. This reform, again, was directed mainly toward appeasement of students, but also was aimed at drawing the interest and support

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(including financial support) of alumni and townsfolk. Due to the sectarian organization of colleges in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the undergraduate college experience involved a great deal of religious discipline (Veysey, 1965). Students became recalcitrant to such influences by the 1880s. College administrators and faculty disdained student insubordination, but they hardly could expel malcontents, since tuition was a critical source of college revenue. Administrators wished not only to control and retain students, but also to attract new students. In their efforts to increase enrollments, college leaders undertook the expansion and liberalization of the curriculum.

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Again, many potential students in the 1880s found college education unattractive due to a perception, shared in considerable degree by employers and the public, that collegiate instruction was irrelevant to securing rewarding positions in the labor market. One response to this popular attitude, tried by some institutions, was to offer programs that were vocational, (i.e., programs that taught concrete job skills). Unfortunately, direct inculcation of skills was not easy to accomplish in many

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of the important occupations to which students sought entry. Some jobs entailed skills that only could be learned in the context of actual work. Beyond the difficulties involved with reproducing various work environments in classrooms, it was costly (in terms of additional faculty, physical plant expenditures, and the like) to offer a broad range of technical instruction. The only way colleges could hope to offer laboratories that imparted practical knowledge was to specialize in a few types of technical training. This was an extremely risky venture, since there were no guarantees that students would attend such programs or that the organization of the targeted occupational group itself would continue to make collegiate preparation indispensable for entry to the workforce. Previous experiments in practical instruction suggested that this was an ill-advised way to restructure colleges; specialized institutions and programs generally had been miserable failures in the past. Even where

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vocational tracks had existed earlier in colleges, students overwhelmingly chose liberal arts programs (as they did in junior colleges over the first 7 decades of the twentieth century). In the 1880s, seasoned college administrators undoubtedly were suspicious of such impermanent demands for vocational education.

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The "knowledge revolution" of the late nineteenth century enabled colleges (particularly colleges with high proportions of Germantrained Ph.D.s) to incorporate much new "scientific" subject matter (e.g., more social science courses) with existing curricula (Rudolph, 1978; Storr, 1953; Veysey, 1965). These additions probably had some positive effects on popular opinion (e.g., attitudes of prospective students and employers seeking recruits) about the usefulness of college education (even in colleges that had made few substantial changes, aside from changing their institutional title to "university"). Many poorer institutions lacked adequate resources to engage new, specialized faculty who could offer expanded curricula. Generally, the professors at such schools were not receptive to proposals that would require them to teach new or additional courses.

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A strategy more prevalent and significant than expansion of the curriculum, which was simultaneously initiated in notable schools such as Harvard and Cornell and rapidly emulated elsewhere, allowed students to choose (in varying degrees, and at different points in their undergraduate careers) their own courses. The elective system eased student discontents about being told what to do and effectively placed part of the burden of appropriate vocational preparation on the students themselves. Although there was much debate about potential "loss of control" over students and about preferable types of elective systems, the success of the innovation in terms of gaining satisfied students was appar-

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ent. Emulation of elite college elective curricula took many forms, depending on the degree of opposition by faculty, administrators, trustees, and friends, and conditioned by the availability of funds and personnel to institute reforms. Nevertheless, by 1900, all but the most intransigent institutions (Catholic colleges were overrepresented in this category) had adopted some form of elective studies in undergraduate education.

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Another strategy employed by colleges, encouragement of new extracurricular activities, only indirectly related to labor-market preparation, but quelled student distaste for stodgy campus discipline. In effect, this tack attempted to compensate for failures in establishing labor-market relevance by telling students and the public that the new collegiate experience went beyond both bookish learning and vocationalism. Colleges of the late nineteenth century began to cultivate a peculiar social typethe "college man or woman." College graduates became articulate and worldly "ladies" and "gentlemen," who also were capable of competitiveness with outsiders. The common rituals of college experience tended to bond graduates together in their interactions in later life, be it through past membership in fraternities and sororities, or through the ability to recount a passage from Dante. The new tolerance of college officials allowed much in the way of playful distraction from the rigors of

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academic life. Relaxed stipulations regarding acceptable male-female interactions and student involvement in frivolous, circumscribed pranksterism with impunity became common in many colleges. College students learned important lessons related to the non-manual labor market about how to socialize and still get their work done. Systems of merits and demerits for students' academic performance and campus demeanor also were loosened by college officials (Smallwood, 1935:7075; Solberg, 1968:37386). By allowing a proliferation of fraternities, sororities, athletic clubs, debating societies, artistic groups, political societies, and so on (some of which entertained the local public), and by supporting intercollegiate academic and athletic competition, colleges also were able significantly to encourage feelings of solidarity among students, alumni, and townsfolk (Veysey, 1965:26894). Such solidarity building was

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important for recruiting new students and for soliciting external funds. The equivalent of "manly" German university dueling societies was absent in the United States, with the exception of military academies (Reeves, 1914), until the emergence of intercollegiate football. Intercollegiate football, of course, was the most celebrated of collegiate extracurricular innovations (Rudolph, 1962:37393). Athletics, as such, were not new to the colleges. Baseball teams, for example, were quite common in the 1880s. Still, student and public interest in college sports remained lukewarm until the 1890s, when football became a popular spec-

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tator sport. The level of brutality of football (the game resembled a disciplined brawl) surely contributed to its success as a spectator sport, even though some college people abhorred such violence in "gentlemanly" college life. Football showed the public that collegians were, or at least could be, "tough" and competitive. Educational Administrators Articulate a Stratified, College-Oriented Educational System, 18901930

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Many colleges followed the lead of early innovative institutions, such as Charles Eliot's Harvard University, in adopting new curricula and otherwise making college experience more palatable for students. This enrollment-boosting strategy was abetted by other tactics that sought to increase the number and preparedness of public high school students entering colleges. Extension of the recruitment bases of colleges was a more important determinant of long-term enrollment growth, because the effects of curricular and social life cloaks alone would have been temporary. The effects of the latter reforms on enrollment growth must be understood in light of their relationships to the changing demands of labor marketsthis will be addressed in Chapter 6.

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The means by which colleges gained control over high school administration and instruction changed between 1880 and 1910 from attempts by individual colleges to recruit from particular high schools, to organized national initiatives by associations of colleges and philanthropic organizations to control the public high schools as a whole. The efforts of colleges to expand their curricula were encouraged by their simultaneous attempts to use diverse curricular programs to draw students from high schools with. The choice for college officials was either to force underprepared public high school students to do remedial work in college preparatory departments or to allow disparate high school courses to count for admission to college. Students and high school administrators alike opposed remedial work, because it slowed academic progress and seemed to denigrate the work of the high schools. Yet, once public high school graduates were admitted to college, their

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underpreparation for the classical curriculum of colleges was apparent to the students themselves as well as to the college faculty. From the standpoint of the colleges, it was not so much a problem of admitting a new social stratum (colleges mainly recruited from prominent middle-class high schools) as a problem of high school curricula being structured rather differently from college curricula. In the late nineteenth century, both systems contended for certification power for

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lower- to middle-level business positions (even though the colleges monopolized professional training in fields other than elementary and high school teaching). Competition between colleges and public high schools, as well as competition between colleges themselves, was reduced significantly by the imposition of a hierarchical relationship between types of institutions. This system of education, making most secondary instruction preparation for later pursuit of the 4-year baccalaureate degree, was put in place with the aid of accreditation associations and philanthropic organizations. I now turn to these influences. Extension of the Collegiate Recruitment Base

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I noted above that the rise of the free public high school was one cause of the slowed growth of college enrollments during the 1880s. In the early 1890s, a movement began that, by the 1920s, had successfully integrated most prestigious public high schools into the educational system as feeder institutions for the colleges. Until the 1890s, public high schools remained important credentialing institutions in their own right. Many high schools (and vocational programs within diversified schools) still credentialed candidates for manual labor and clerical positions. However, during the 1890s, prestigious public high schools enhanced their college-preparatory function by securing memberships in powerful regional accreditation associations. This trend had spread to most public high schools by 1920; vocational education in high schools took a back seat to academic courses from that point forward.

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Until the 1890s, American colleges almost universally admitted students based on the personal examinations of applicants by college presidents and/or faculty. 7 Most evidence suggests that college officials were lenient about admitting students under "conditions" of remedial study (although the students undoubtedly suffered much apprehension during the examination process). College presidents valued their jobs and their institutions needed students.8 Wechsler (1977:7) summarized the traditional admissions process as follows:

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Just before the start of the fall semester, the prospective freshman of a typical old time college appeared at a stated time in the office of the college president. He would be questioned by the president and perhaps by some faculty members on his previous studies in Greek, Latin, and mathematics. The decision to admit a student with or without conditions or to reject him entirely was determined by the quality of his answers, the college's financial picture, and not infrequently on the kindliness of a faculty member.

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In order to prepare for admission to colleges, students typically studied under the tutelage of an educated minister or college graduate, or enrolled in one of the regional denominational academies affiliated with a college (or, in cases where colleges maintained their own academies, at the college campus academy). Typical admissions processes did not tap all potential student populations. Students who had not prepared at the few informally approved academies of a college failed to present themselves for admission due to lack of knowledge of the college, legitimate fears that preparation in other contexts was incommensurate with specific entrance requirements (academy instruction was not standardized), or both.

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The first major attempt to remedy the problems involved in recruiting increased numbers of public high school students, while at the same time assuring student preparedness for college, was undertaken at the University of Michigan in 1870 (Wechsler, 1977:1639). 9 Under the initial leadership of acting president Henry Frieze, who served during 187071, and the subsequent implementation of Frieze's program by president James Angell, the University of Michigan established a system of recruitment based on the certification of students at selected Michigan public high schools and private secondary academies. Frieze had visited Germany, examined its educational system, and been impressed with the systematic recruitment German universities made from graduates (Arbiturs) of the state-supported gymnasia (elite, classical education-oriented secondary schools). German supervision of secondary education and coordination of secondary school and university curricula was

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controlled by universities, which sent representatives to inspect and make recommendations about the quality of secondary schools and their graduates. The emergence of numerous public high schools provided Frieze with the potential to create an analogous system in Michigan. In 1870, Frieze successfully convinced the entire Michigan faculty to accept the certificate experiment as a solution to recurring enrollment shortages and associated faculty reimbursement problems.

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As originally planned, faculty inspectors would visit Michigan high schools annually and grant certificates to individual students who had passed the examinations given at high schools. While this method of individual examinations worked well at small high schools, it was difficult for the examiners to use the same strategy at large schools, where the number of examinees exceeded the capabilities of examiners (examiners typically stayed only a day). An important innovation emerged from this situation, as examiners resorted to the evaluation of the facilities, faculty, and academic programs of entire high schools, rather than the examination of individual students. The ''standard" accredited pub-

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lic high school was defined by university men (there were few female faculty) as a school that facilitated college preparatory work. These were the beginnings of standardization of high school organization and pedagogy.

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The University of Michigan did not altogether abandon its original system of personal examinations of prospective students on college premises. In the 1870s, 574 students were admitted by the older examination system, while 469 students from 16 approved schools were admitted by certificate (Wechsler, 1977:28,32). The success of the Michigan certificate system in securing a steady flow of new students increased throughout the 1880s. Michigan enjoyed moderate enrollment growth between 1870 and 1880 (from 392 to 521) and averted the common enrollment problems of the 1880s by increasing its liberal arts student body to 925 by 1890 (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1873; 1880; 1890). 10 Much of Michigan's unusual enrollment growth in the 1880s was due to an extension of the certificate system. Michigan's list of 16 accredited high schools in the 1870s grew to 71 by 1888, including 19 high schools in Illinois, 3 in

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Minnesota, and 1 each in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania (Wechsler, 1977:34).

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The certificate system of college admissions was adopted by more institutions in the late 1870s and 1880s, and became common in many larger colleges in the 1890s.11 It was not unusual for a public high school to be accredited by more than one college in the early 1890s; this created administrative difficulties for high schools (e.g., when the accreditation standards of two colleges varied). Regional accreditation associations (e.g., the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, the New England Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools, and the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Middle States and Maryland) emerged in the 1890s partly as a solution to the problems associated with multiple accreditation lists, but also as "mediators" in struggles over the curricular standardization that took place between colleges and high schools.12

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In the 1880s, the certificate system showed its worth as a mechanism for securing more students, but many potential high school recruitment centers were not yet on the lists of colleges because the administrators and faculty at these schools rejected the proposed preparatory role of public high schools. Such high school officials saw their institutions as terminal vocational training centers or simply as places where young people learned citizenship and real-life skills. Even high schools that made the accreditation lists of colleges fought for autonomy in choosing which high school curricula should be conceived as preparatory for college work. High schools generally were unwilling to offer Greek (this was one

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minor concession the colleges granted the high schools). On the other hand, the colleges did not want to accept drawing, physical education, home economics, and so forth as fulfillments of entrance requirements.

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Between 1890 and 1920, the high schools largely lost the war over self-determination; their mission became defined primarily as that of college preparatory institutions (Wesley, 1957:5978). 13 College control of high school curricula after 1890 was furthered by several related and well-organized attempts to subordinate the high schools to college needs: (1) by highly publicized and influential National Education Association (NEA) committee reports (including the Committee of Ten report of 1892 1893) on the subject of high school curricula, (2) through the efforts of regional accreditation associations, and (3) by the successful attempts of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (19061930) and associated philanthropic organizations to standardize instruction at both high schools and colleges. The Committee of Ten and High School-College Articulation

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National advocacy of improved relations between colleges and high schools first emerged out of the National Education Associationsponsored meeting of the National Council on Education in 1892. Nicholas M. Butler of Columbia University (then a faculty member, in 1901, president of this institution) played a critical role in choosing the membership of the Committee of Ten, which emerged out of this meeting. Butler also influenced the selection of members of nine subcommittees, each with 10 members (a total of 100 members). The Committee of Ten included president Charles Eliot of Harvard, president James Angell of Michigan, and U.S. Commissioner of Education William Harris. The curricular subcommittees included such academic luminaries of the day as Woodrow Wilson and James H. Robinson. Although a select few high school superintendents, principals, and schoolmasters were included in (or, more precisely, coopted to) the committee,

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representation decidedly favored college interests (53 out of 100 were college presidents or professors). Much of the high school representation consisted of officials of institutions that already were sympathetic to college-recruitment interests. Harvard's Eliot played a key role in assembling subcommittee information and writing the final report of the Committee of Ten. The language Eliot used contained many strategic references to the committee's acknowledgment of high school autonomy: "The secondary schools of the United States, taken as a whole, do not exist for the purpose of preparing boys and girls for colleges" (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1894:51). Certainly Eliot was more flexible about which curricula might justifiably

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count for college admission, as he had long advocated inclusion of "newer disciplines" at Harvard (indeed, Eliot saw the report as a legitimization of new disciplines), but apart from lip service to high school independence, the report dealt exclusively with changes that would gain the colleges more and better prepared students. 14 The academic subcommittees merely dealt with traditional and some of the newer academic disciplines (i.e., with those disciplines that existed in most colleges or were emerging in more innovative colleges), not with those subjects that were offered primarily in the high schools.

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One argument the report of the Committee of Ten put forth as a concession to high school interests had to do with the student decisionmaking process regarding entry to college. Because college admissions standards, however variable they were, required high school students early on to commit themselves to appropriate high school curricula, many late deciders were unable to attend college because they had spent too much time in the wrong courses. If all high school students were required to take college preparatory courses (which, to Eliot, doubled as "preparation for life") in high school, the likelihood of such unfortunate cases would be greatly reduced (Wechsler, 1977:85). It is difficult to believe that independent-thinking high school administrators would have swallowed this line of argument, but the claim does indicate the extent to which the Committee of Ten was attentive to the notion of a high school "career" and its relationship to college attendance.

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In the years following the report of the Committee of Ten, the NEA and various elite colleges originated several other conferences and committees that effectively fought for college curricular interests in high schools. In the northeastern United States, the topic of uniform college entrance requirements as a mechanism for recruiting more and better qualified students was entertained by the presidents of several major universities. Beginning in 1896, six conferences dealing with curricula and entrance requirements met at Columbia University under the leadership of Columbia's Nicholas M. Butler and Seth Low. Representatives were present from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Cornell universities. The various participants in the Columbia conferences had differential controls over their respective feeder high schools, so the final recommendations of the meetings were not uniformly implemented (Wechsler, 1977:88105).15

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Accreditation Organizations Subordinate Public High Schools The divergent certificate systems of individual colleges produced a great deal of confusion for high schools that attempted to prepare students

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for entry to more than one college. Maintenance of a certificate system also was costly, especially in cases where far-reaching recruitment was attempted. The recommendations of the Committee of Ten were carried out on individual state and regional levels, rather than on a national basis. In the years following the release of the report of the Committee of Ten, one after another regional accreditation organization was founded, typically under the leadership of persons who had participated in the preparation of the report of the Committee of Ten. Just as the original report had emphasized the standardization of high schools more than uniformity among colleges, so the work of accreditation associations sought through local politics and control of high school reputations to bring regional high schools into compliance with the desires of college officials. It was not until around 1910, following the example of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and

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Rockefeller's General Education Board, that regional accreditation associations attempted to standardize colleges and exclude from their accreditation lists discordant higher institutions.

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Regional accreditation associations were strongly supported by smaller denominational colleges and technical institutes. Many of these schools had been hurt by the successful recruitment efforts of certificate-accepting universities such as Michigan, or by the simple prestigebased popularity of other institutions, which held fast to traditional entrance examinations. Smaller, less notable colleges could not inflate the prestige of high schools in the same way that larger or more prestigious colleges could benefit high schools, so the attempts of weaker colleges to accredit their own high schools (i.e., force high schools to structure pedagogy in ways conducive to transfer to colleges) usually failed. If the costs of expansive accreditation were exorbitant for schools such as the University of Michigan, it was even less feasible for a poorly funded college to accredit high schools. For their part, weaker colleges would support and, in some cases, help administer regional

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accreditation because they would benefit from the powers of the accrediting association to force local high schools into a subservient college preparatory role (even if this preparation was not wholly tailored to the existing curricula of weaker schools). As Wechsler (1977:5758) notes, the accreditation of high schools in the 1890s varied in magnitude based on the presence or absence of regional accreditation associations and on the degree of support powerful regional universities lent the associations:
The certificate system grew most rapidly in the Midwest and in the New England states. Perhaps its rapid acceptance in the Midwest can be traced

Page 123 to the early sponsorship of the more powerful institutions in the area. In New England, the plan counteracted the enormous regional influence of Harvard and Yale. It took additional time to get off the ground in the South, but once launched the plan gained rapid acceptance. Its expansion in the Middle Atlantic states was retarded by the lack of a regional accrediting commission. . . . The Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland, the logical association to sponsor such a service, was dominated by Columbia and Princeton which, for their own reasons, opposed any steps in that direction.

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Even the Middle Atlantic states emulated the accreditation associations of other regions by the 1910s, although some elite eastern universities continued to use admissions criteria that, at that time, differed from the admissions practices of the majority of colleges in the nation (e.g., written examinations, such as those devised by the Columbia Universitysponsored College Entrance Examination Board or the General Examination Board) (Lagemann, 1983:10814).

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The North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools (NCA), founded in 1895, was an influential regional accreditation association. Typical of regional accreditation associations, the North Central Association reached its goals through political maneuvering among local educationists and bestowing prestige on high schools, rather than through the financial resources of the organization. 16 In 1894, a letter of invitation signed by presidents Angell, Rogers, Adams, and Harper of Michigan, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and Chicago, respectively, and by the principals of three University of Michigan feeder schools, was sent to midwestern college presidents and prominent high school administrators. The North Central Association early on sought out and secured a wide geographical membership in major universities and colleges of the upper Midwest and Plains states (e.g., Ohio State, Purdue, Chicago, Northwestern, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska,

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Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Western Reserve, Oberlin, Grinnell, Colorado College, Illinois College, Beloit, and others). Also included in the early membership of the association were the superintendents of school systems in St. Louis, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Topeka, St. Paul, Peoria, Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago,17 together with numerous high school and academy principals (Davis, 1945:1819). By 1900, the membership of the association included the most prominent educators in the region. The goals of the North Central Association in its first decade of operation largely echoed the agenda of the Committee of Ten. Indeed, the leadership of the organization perceived its purpose partly as an implementation of the mandates of the Committee of Ten and of later NEA ini-

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tiatives. The early Proceedings of the NCA argued that "courses in secondary schools should be the same for students who intend to go to college and for those who do not" (North Central Association, 1897:3233). Within both colleges and secondary institutions, vocational/technical schools were to be separated from academic departments or altogether eliminated. High school curricular reforms geared to continuous (as opposed to "late") college preparation were sought in history, English, foreign languages, and mathematics for the first 2 years of high school. The length of high school courses was encouraged to be full-year; they were to be standardized, "unit" courses rather than one semester or shorter "cram courses." Such standardization would enable admissions officers of colleges to compare high school applicants for college admission. As a concession to the high schools, the list of required books in English courses was to be "open'' (i.e., elective) rather than prescribed.

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Professionalization of High School Teaching and Administration

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A critical area the NCA targeted for reforms was urban school systems. The representation of major city school superintendents in the organization, such as A.F. Nightingale of Chicago, was actively sought out by NCA leaders. 18 City high schools represented tremendous recruitment centers for colleges, but many city high schools were controlled by local boards (frequently defined by ethnic and political allegiances), principals, and faculty that often proved recalcitrant to the suggestions of college reformers. Urban technical high schools were among the more powerful institutions resisting college domination of education. In order to break up urban high school fiefdoms, the NCA and other national educational organizations advocated centralized control of urban schools under the direction of professionally trained school superintendents:

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[T]he efficiency of the public schools in cities of considerable size is almost wholly contingent upon the framework of the organization under which they are managed and the legal status and functions of the officials charged with their care; that the system of government in such cities should be one that permits boards to exercise none but legislative functions and devolves executive duties and the appointment of subordinate officers and of teachers upon executive officers (North Central Association, 1899:ix).

Tyack (1974:13338) correctly notes that university presidents saw centralized urban school superintendencies as influential job placements for

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graduates of university education departments. The centralization movement in urban schools also fought to secure school board positions for successful professional and business leaders who typically were receptive to the standardization demands of colleges.

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Conspicuously absent on the membership rosters of the NCA were presidents and faculty from normal schools. Many normal schools had been founded in the 1880s and 1890s and enrollments in such institutions were quite sizeable. Prior to 1898, the NCA generally had classified normal schools as secondary schools, which meant that graduation from a normal school would only count as sufficient preparation for college entry. This must have seemed an insult to people at normal schools, most of whom regarded their liberal arts departments as colleges. One problem with the accreditation of normal schools was that many such institutions granted teaching certificates after completion of a 3-year degree program (and at some, the B.A. degree as well); this was different from the almost universal 4-year college degree system that was in place by the 1890s. The normal schools clearly were not high schools either, so they did not easily fit the classification system of the NCA.

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Graduates of normal school teacher education programs disproportionately entered common school teaching positions, but some (and probably increasing in numbers in the 1890s) also entered secondary school teaching. 19 High school teaching originally had been monopolized by male college graduates. By the 1890s, a significant number of common school teachers (many of them female normal school graduates) had secured positions in the expanded labor market for high school teachers. In the 1890s, the NCA played on the fears of college-trained secondary schoolmasters in order to win their support for various reforms (Herbst, 1989:17374). In 1902, the NCA proposed that in accredited high schools "the minimum scholastic attainment of all high school teachers be the equivalent of graduation from a college belonging to the [NCA], including special training in the subjects they teach, although such requirements shall not be construed as retroactive" (North

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Central Association, 1902:36). Recruitment of college-educated teachers would help implement academic (college) curricula in high schools, whereas the nonretroactive clause assured the continuing support, or at least passive compliance, of older teachers. It was not until 1904 that the inspection of regional high schools produced the first list of 156 NCA accredited high schools (72% of which were located in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin) (Davis, 1945:55). Prior to that date, it is likely that institutions without their own accreditation lists used the lists of major universities such as Michigan and Illinois.

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Further Definition of the Educational System: Philanthropic Foundations, High Schools, and Colleges

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The North Central Association had no formal criteria for accreditation of member colleges prior to 1912, although agitation for such measures was underway as early as 1906. The distinction between common school, high school, and college had been addressed in NCA discussions ever since 1895. The formalization of these distinctions was executed in 1912 when the standards for definition of colleges were published. As was the case with most regional accreditation associations, early control efforts had been directed at high schools, with the colleges (even nonmember colleges) left alone to make what they could of the new uniformities in secondary schools. Considerable variation in structure existed among higher educational institutions in the first decade of the twentieth century. The impetus for standardization of types of colleges originated around 1905 in the collaborative efforts of private philanthropic foundations of national scope, particularly John D. Rockefeller's

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General Education Board (GEB), chartered in 1903 and Andrew Carnegie's Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), organized in 1905.

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The GEB and CFAT both included nationally renowned college presidents and faculty on their boards of trustees. The CFAT membership included Charles Eliot of Harvard (who was elected chairman of the board), Nicholas Butler of Columbia, Arthur Hadley of Yale, David S. Jordan of Stanford, Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, Jacob G. Schurman of Cornell, William R. Harper of Chicago, and Henry S. Pritchett (a past president of MIT, personally brought to CFAT by Andrew Carnegie and subsequently elected president of the organization) (Lagemann, 1983:37). The GEB was headed by Baptist minister Frederick Gates and Wallace Buttrick (a past president of the Peabody Education Fund and a college friend of Gates). The board of trustees of the GEB included 16 businessmen, 4 lawyers, 11 educators, and 2 ministers. Administration of the CFAT and GEB was largely handled through executive committees that included many prominent intellectual/businessman hybrids (e.g.,

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Frank Vanderlip, Vice President of National City Bank and Robert Franks, President of Home Trust Company. (Barrow, 1990:6164). 20 Much literature exists that asserts, in one way or another, that capitalist-inspired philanthropic organizations established a great deal of control over U.S. higher education in the early twentieth century. In Chapter 2 I suggested some general weaknesses in neo-Marxian sociology of education. With regard to "business control of higher education," it is important to realize that foundation control of colleges was not simply about "capitalists" coercing workers and scholars. Foundation influ-

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ences over higher education also were informed by the conflicts between different types of "workers" (mainly professionals) in labor-market competition. This competition was only incidentally spurred by capitalists. The foundations also were guided by simple interests of various types of educational groups in maintaining the relative advantages of their organizations vis--vis other educational groups. Business "infiltration" of the colleges in the early twentieth century may have done less to create businesssuited reforms of curricula than to secure good jobs for children and cronies of locally and nationally prominent businessmen.

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The CFAT and GEB were administered by individuals who acted more in the interests of warring educational and professional groups than in the profit-making interests of the capitalists who funded their work. Capitalists were more enamored with the ideology of educational efficiency than with speculating on the pecuniary returns of educational reform. The principal goals of foundations were to rationalize the administration of colleges, to financially stabilize particular institutions, to eliminate competition between similar schools, and ultimately, to rationally stratify education. These ends did not really aim to limit enrollment expansion or to create an institution that would provide capitalists with educated labor (a commodity colleges unwittingly produced for capitalists in abundant supply long before the organization of the great philanthropic organizations). The rise of commercial education in the colleges in the 1920s and 1930s had more to do with the

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"professionalization" of business management by college-educated managers in corporations than with capitalist sponsorship of such developments. The primary impetus to numerous failed ventures in business education in the nineteenth century came from college administrators who wanted to increase enrollments, not from the railways, or the steel, communications, or meatpacking industries. These employers, when they recruited college graduates, were quite content with individuals trained in classical U.S. higher education. Large businesses and government recruited college graduates with liberal arts training to management positions before and after the emergence of corporate philanthropy. The great foundations had little interest in supporting vocational education, as was indicated by the inability of the American Association of Junior Colleges to receive significant corporate or foundation support for any of their

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work (even vocational education) prior to the 1960s (Brint & Karabel, 1989). The first publicly stated objective of CFAT was to provide retirement pensions for college faculty, but the organization clearly had a broadbased agenda for higher educational reform from the very beginning of its operations. The retirement pension system was a lever to greater influence over such issues as articulation between elements of the na-

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scent educational system, professional education, agricultural education, technical education, denominational control of colleges, regional competition between colleges, faculty work loads, entrance and graduation requirements in secondary and baccalaureate education, college administration, advertising, and finance. These topics had been concerns of various reformers for decades, but under the joint sponsorship of philanthropic and accreditation organizations, compelling answers to an amazing array of previously irresolvable issues were finally possible on a national scale.

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The original economic incentive CFAT used to influence colleges, again, was a retirement pension fund for faculty. College administrators could use this pension arrangement as part of faculty compensation, thereby substantially reducing the salary expenses of their institutions. The effects that absence of a pension fund would have on colleges that could not or would not comply with CFAT standards explicitly was acknowledged in CFAT's First Annual Report (1906):

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There can be little doubt that the establishment of a system of retiring allowances in a large number of American colleges will result in the acceptance of the retiring allowance as a part of the teacher's compensation, so that institutions for which the Carnegie Foundation is not available must provide such a system from other sources. Many institutions will prefer to do this, however difficult the process may be, rather than accept an educational policy which in the judgement of its faculty is undesirable, or to surrender a connection which ministers to its spiritual and intellectual growth.

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The reticent colleges alluded to above were, of course, those colleges with strong denominational affiliations. I shall have more to say on this topic shortly. The cost of the pension plan to CFAT was far too great to extend coverage to all colleges, yet national influence was precisely the goal of the foundation. In 1916, CFAT changed the retirement pension plan to a matching contributions plan, thereby allowing extension of benefits to more American colleges.

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One of the main obstacles to implementation of the pension plan and other CFAT initiatives was the existence in U.S. higher education of numerous denominational boards of higher education. These controlling boards financed and organized member colleges in ways that ran counter to CFAT policies. CFAT made no concessions to denominational boards of higher education; quite simply, schools that could not demonstrate autonomy from denominational control were ineligible for CFAT benefits (and subject to thinly veiled derision in CFAT publications). The regional and ethnic fragmentation of most religious control of colleges (Catholic colleges

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were something of an exception to religious splintering) made it relatively easy for CFAT to offer incentives sufficient to encourage individual colleges to relinquish their denominational affiliations. Many of the originally Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Unitarian colleges (typically New England-sponsored colleges) changed to nominally nonsectarian institutions in the 1880s and 1890s, well in advance of CFAT dictates. These early changes aimed partly to get more students from other religious backgrounds, but also to help such colleges to "make" the first lists of "approved" CFAT institutions. USBE data on the formal affiliations of colleges with religious institutions indicate a rapid growth in the number of nonsectarian institutions in the years following the founding of CFAT.

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Another way that the foundations, especially CFAT (and later, the USBE), influenced educational administration was through the publication of widely read surveys of state and national educational organization, which covered liberal arts, professional, and technical education; high school, college, university, and professional school curricular innovations; and so on. These surveys were written by some of the most highly respected persons in education, the professions, and government. The recommendations expressed in surveys later made their way into guidelines for foundation support of colleges and accreditation criteria for colleges. In conducting surveys of state systems of higher education, CFAT attempted to map for state legislators a means of regulating (especially public) higher education in their states in accordance with a national plan (at that time, such regulation was almost nonexistent). The surveys encouraged American educational administrators

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to emulate those institutions that were lauded in print. The survey movement, which gained steam in the 1920s, basically manipulated the reputations of schools (to students, employers, benefactors, etc.) as a means of influencing such schools.

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An interesting distinction that the foundations, under the influence of research universities, entertained but never successfully implemented, was the difference between college education (general studies) and university education (specialized research in academic disciplines). In several major research universities, a movement was underway to eliminate the first 2 years of general studies in order to enhance student selectivity, faculty, facilities, and so on in the specialized research programs that would make up the last 2 years of undergraduate education. Such universities reasoned that high schools were best suited to accomplish instruction in general studies, either by reforming their curricula or by extending the number of years that college preparatory students studied in high schools. Students who excelled in the upgraded high schools then would be recruited to universities, much as the notable German gymnasia

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graduates were recruited for higher studies. The first experi-

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ment with this reform was carried out by president Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago (Goodspeed, 1916:15455; Storr, 1966:11720). Hutchins arranged with the principal of Joliet Public High School to offer college courses at high schools, which would be the equivalent of the first 2 years of University of Chicago undergraduate study. The college division of the high school was called Joliet Junior College, the first junior college in the nation. Nearly all of the junior colleges that were founded before World War II originated as collegepreparatory divisions of public high schools (Brint & Karabel, 1989). Although Hutchins' experiment ultimately failed to eliminate a separate college division at the University of Chicago (experiments at other universities also failed in this respect), the distinction between general studies in the first 2 years of baccalaureate education and major studies in specialized disciplines during the final 2 years of undergraduate

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study was supported by CFAT and other higher educational control organizations and eventually was institutionalized in U.S. undergraduate education. Regional accreditation associations worked with philanthropic organizations to adopt criteria for college membership in their organizations (although the issue of denominational control of colleges generally was not raised by accreditation organizations). In doing so, the accreditation associations considerably extended their authority and the authority of foundations. In 1912, the North Central Association produced a list of 70 accredited colleges. Nineteen standards set forth for accreditation by the NCA between 1912 and 1919 dealt with faculty qualifications and workloads, financial stability of colleges, graduation and admissions requirements, adequate enrollments, professional and graduate school affiliations, and departmental structures:

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1. The minimum scholastic requirement of all college teachers shall be equivalent to graduation from a college belonging to this Association, and graduate work equal at least to that required for the master's degree. 2. The college shall require for admission not less than fourteen secondary units [fifteen in 1919], as defined by this Association. 3. The college shall require not less than 120 semester hours for graduation. 4. The college, if a corporate institution, shall possess a productive endowment of not less than $200,000. 5. The college, if a tax-supported institution, shall receive an annual income of not less than $100,000. 6. The college shall maintain at least eight distinct departments in liberal arts, each with at least one professor giving full time to college work in that department.

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7. The number of hours of work by each teacher will vary in different departments . . . but in no case shall more than eighteen hours per week be required, fifteen being recommended as a maximum.

Page 131 8. The college must be able to prepare its graduates to enter recognized graduate schools as candidates for advanced degrees. 9. The college should limit the number of students in a recitation or laboratory class to thirty (North Central Association, 1912: 2425).

In 1917, NCA added two additional stipulations regarding enrollments and the "adequacy" of affiliated professional schools:
10. No institution shall be admitted to the approved list unless it has a total registration of at least fifty students, if it reports itself as a junior college, and at least one hundred students if it carries courses beyond the junior college. 11. When an institution has, in addition to the College of Liberal Arts, professional or technical schools or departments, the College of Liberal Arts shall not be accepted for the approved list of the Association unless the professional or technical departments are of an acceptable grade.

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The following year, in 1918, several important criteria for accreditation as junior colleges and teacher colleges were added. For junior colleges, separation of their curricula from those of the high schools in which they were often physically housed was pivotal:
12. The work of the junior college must be organized on a collegiate as distinguished from a high school basis. 13. Students registered in a junior college who are permitted to enroll in regular high school classes shall not be given full junior college credit for such work. . . . No junior college will be accredited unless it has a registration of twenty-five students if it offers but a single year, and fifty students if it offers more than a single year. 14. No junior college will be accredited by this Association when maintained in connection with a high school or secondary school unless such school is also accredited by this Association (North Central Association, 1918:102).

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The last clause encouraged high schools that sought to increase their prestige through offering college courses to fall in line with NCA reforms. For teachers' colleges, in 1918 the following conditions became prerequisite to accreditation:
15. The minimum scholastic requirement of all teachers in such schools . . . shall be equivalent to graduation from a college belonging to this Association, supplemented by special training or experience, or both, of at least three years. Graduate study and training in research equivalent to that required for the master's degree are urgently recommended. 16. Such schools shall require for admission not less than fifteen secondary units as defined by this Association.

Page 132 17. Such schools shall receive an annual income . . . of not less than $50,000, or if less, at least $150 per year per student in average attendance. 18. The average teaching program of a teacher in such schools shall not exceed fifteen clock hours per week in actual teaching. The class unit for instruction shall not exceed thirty students. 19. No institution shall be admitted to the approved list unless it has a total registration of at least 100 students from September to June (North Central Association, 1918: 102).

The degree requirements for teachers college faculty was a B.A., whereas the degree requirements for liberal arts college faculty was an M.A. In the cases of older teachers' college faculty, most already had 3 years of experience; younger faculty would need to complete an M.A. degree or gain specialized training in nonaccredited schools.

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Resistance to the efforts of the foundations and accreditation associations came mainly from the writings of individual authors in the populist press. Colleges that could not or would not change their organization in order to receive foundation funds or regional accreditation simply represented noncomplying institutions. There is little evidence of effective organized resistance to foundation and accreditation association influences over the colleges. Schools that could not meet the criteria often were institutions with insufficient resources; such institutions could not muster much negative publicity against external organizations, however much they may have resented such influences. There also were cases where colleges would not comply with the CFAT for good reasonsother sources (e.g., religious organizations) provided support that CFAT was unable to match. Members of these colleges seldom openly criticized the foundations or accreditation associations.

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Conclusion The brief slowdown of enrollment growth in the 1880s was significant because it provided a stimulus for many colleges to adopt curricular and social life reforms that enticed students to attend colleges. Later innovations in student recruitment and subordination of competitor institutions to colleges strengthened the input side of higher educational expansion. The other important aspect of higher educational expansion, occupational placements, was bolstered by establishment of stronger linkages of college degrees to entry to a broad range of professional and bureaucratic employment situations. Other outcomes of college attendance remained important (e.g., mar-

Page 133

riages within "appropriate" social and economic groups or solidarity building in colleges dominated by racial and ethnic groups), but these functions are insufficient to explain the sustained growth of U.S. higher education in the twentieth century. Increases in the recruitment of collegeeducated workers for widespread occupations, together with college accommodations to the interests of the prospective employers of their students, supplied the basis for the continued growth of student enrollments (i.e., student admissions became closed tied to the perceived occupational outcomes of college attendance). In Chapter 6 I show how these forces worked in several important occupational spheres.

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6 Labor Market Transformations and College Accommodations

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The final element of a theory of higher educational expansion in the United States concerns new forms of occupational recruitment and associated higher educational changes. Prior to the 1890s, much of the enrollment expansion in U.S. higher education was due to forces apart from labor-market changes (even though college-educated individuals regularly entered privileged sectors of the labor market). Extensive college founding and the subordination of competitor organizations during the early era of U.S. higher educational expansion nevertheless prepared the groundwork for such expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early expansion created a set of institutions that were well equipped to adapt to twentieth-century labor market demands. The task of this chapter is to show how the changing bases of organizational recruitment to professional and bureaucratic workplaces encouraged selection of collegians and how colleges themselves

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increasingly came to structure education as preparation for such types of employment. In Chapter 3, I argued that technical and controlbased recruitment uncertainties in specific labor markets encouraged employers to hire college graduates. Basically, employers need to know that recruits are capable of performing the tasks associated with jobs and they need to be assured that employees will, in fact, perform up to their abilities (i.e., even under circumstances where malfeasance looms). This chapter aims to spell out more clearly several types of historical workplace transformations that increased college-based recruitment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Labor Market Transformations and Collegiate Careers

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It will be useful to review the broad set of historical changes that occurred in U.S. labor market composition and in the distribution of college graduate careers. The timing of changes in labor markets and college careers

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suggests a causal relationship between the two phenomena. Later, I will explore several types of labor market recruitment situations that encouraged employers to select college graduates in filling particular positions. Changes in Labor Market Composition

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Prior to 1870, the U.S. Census Bureau did not collect detailed information about the distribution of American workers in various occupations. However, Edwards (1943) compiled from the U.S. census comparable occupational statistics for the period 18701940. The percentage distribution of workers in various industrial sectors shows several well-known patterns of change: (1) a general decline in agricultural employment; (2) steady growth of positions in extraction from 1870 to 1910, followed by a decline; (3) general growth of jobs in manufacturing (up to the Great Depression), trade, and public service; (4) little change in domestic/personal service, forestry, and fishing employment over the entire period; (5) rapid growth of transportation and communications work from 1870 to 1900, followed by moderate growth through 1930; (6) a steady increase of professional work up to 1920, then a significant jump within this category over the next decade; and (7) moderate

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overall growth of clerical jobs to 1900, followed by large increases to 1930.

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A more detailed portrait of change in selected occupational titles within specific labor market sectors is also available in Edwards' data. 1 It is important to my argument to establish that the general growth of administrative positions in many workplaces in fact took place, especially after 1890. Edwards' analysis indicates that, indeed, there was a ''managerial revolution," and that it took place in some types of work before others. For example, federal and state administrative positions grew enormously after 1900, whereas city and county positions marked a significant increase between 1920 and 1930. A predominantly male group of stenographers and typists multiplied at a tremendous rate in the late nineteenth century, whereas twentieth-century growth of this group was slower and female dominated. Managerial positions in manufacturing expanded after 1880 and recorded tremendous growth between 1910 and 1920. In mineral extraction, the managerial sector again showed

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steady growth, with the 1880s marking a period of rapid expansion of administrative positions. From 1870 to 1930 a number of trends surfaced in professional employment. For instance, the basic trend in ministry, education, and journalism was one of growing numbers of practitioners and declining rates of growth from 1870 to 1920 (in ministry, from 44.1% in the 1870s to 20.1% in the 1900s; in education, from 76.2% in the 1870s to 29.3% in the 1910s;

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in journalism, from 127.8% in the 1870s to 0 change in the 1910s). In law, medicine, and veterinary surgery the late nineteenth century was a period of general growth in total numbers of practitioners, whereas 1900 in law, 1910 in medicine, and 1920 in veterinary surgery were points at which rates of growth declined or actual numbers of workers actually decreased. Workers in allied health professions (particularly nursing, but also chiropractic) registered manifold increases in their numbers between 1900 and 1930; the numbers of social workers, correctional workers, and librarians also multiplied during this period.

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Numerical expansion of positions will be important to my argument about the role of education in the recruitment of administrators, but the simple expansion of the numbers of professional practitioners does not necessarily suggest increases in education-based professional recruitment. Professions are, among other things, relative monopolies of positions based in formal educational credential barriers to practice (see Chapter 3). Overproduction of practitioners in the absence of new clientele markets is frequently associated with weak linkages to specific credential-granting institutions (e.g., colleges and professional schools). More important than numerical increases in particular professions is the creation of higher credentials for entry to professional schools and practices, the extension of professional practices to new clientele, and the subordination of competing professional groups.

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College Graduates Enter New Labor Markets The second set of data regarding occupations comes from records of the occupations of college graduates. What is needed at the outset of this analysis are correlations between labor market changes and job placements of students, even though, again, such simple numerical correlations are not necessarily required to establish credential linkages (especially for professions). Even where labor markets failed to grow or actually declined in numbers, it is useful to know if college people were increasingly entering such jobs.

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The U.S. Bureau of Education did not collect data on the occupations of graduates. Many individual colleges compiled information from student admissions forms or from later surveys of alumni regarding birth-places, parentage, mortality, age at college entry, marriages (often including notation of couples who both graduated from the institution), places and dates of high school or academy preparation, publications, wartime participation, memberships in societies (both in school and later), and, most important in the present context, information on career paths. Fre-

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quently, these directories included occupational titles and dates, locations of jobs, and names of employers up to the time of the survey. Some college archives still possess original surveys of alumni. In some cases, selected data from the surveys (including occupations) were aggregated, but the formatting of this information varies so widely from school to school that comparisons are difficult. Much of this work was done in conjunction with alumni associations. Because these associations developed mainly after 1900, the information contained in alumni directories is probably more accurate and complete for later graduates (although very recent graduates sometimes are hard to track down and therefore disproportionately are placed in "other" categories in such surveys).

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Two systematic studies of the occupations of graduates are worth noting. The first was Burritt's (1912) investigation of the graduates of the collegiate departments of 37 U.S. colleges and universities in 5-year intervals from 1642 (Harvard's first graduates) to 1900. Individual statistics for many of the 37 colleges are included in the published study. Burritt worked from the alumni records of the schools and classified the graduates within the 10 occupational categories listed in Table 6.1. I have tabulated Burritt's figures for the period 18011900. Burritt placed individuals in only one occupational classification (usually the job they had held longest), even if they held several positions over their careers (Burritt, 1912:11). The schools included in the study are disproportionately private, eastern, and elite schools, at least by late nineteenth-century standards. Percentage distributions of the graduates of these colleges indicate several patterns: (1) a general decline in the

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proportions of graduates in the traditional professions of ministry, law, and medicine, even though each (and especially law) remained important career destinations; (2) a general growth of graduates in various facets of education, with significant increases occurring in the early 1880s and, again, throughout the 1890s; (3) an increase in engineers over the century, but very sporadic levels of engineering jobs late in the century; (4) little significant change in public service employment, except for brief rises from 181135 and, again, from 185665 (perhaps attributable to Civil War employment); (5) a peak in writer and journalist careers in 1885, followed by a decline up to 1900; (6) few agricultural jobs, considering the high proportion of farmers in the labor force distribution over this period and the inclusion of several state universities in the study; and (7) a general rise in business positions up to 1870, then sporadic activity up to 1900. For commercial occupations, Burritt

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(1912:7273) observed declines during periods of economic depression, such as those following the panics of 1872 and 1893. 2 The rise in business jobs was most pronounced in older,

TABLE 6.1 Occupational Distribution of Graduates of Thirty

Year Ministry Law Medicine Education Comm 180105 214 305 77 55 % 22.3 31.8 8.4 5.7 180610 258 371 116 47 % 23.2 33.4 10.5 4.2 181115 382 451 197 81 % 23.9 28.2 12.3 5.6 181620 376 368 156 90 % 28.5 27.4 11.6 6.7 182125 612 503 276 137 % 29.7 24.4 13.4 6.7 182630 582 599 217 193 % 28.3 29.8 10.5 9.4 183135 696 613 248 223 % 30.8 27.1 10.9 9.9 183640 973 802 238 321 % 32.3 26.6 7.9 10.7 184145 900 953 403 351 % 25.4 26.8 11.4 9.9 184650 925 1,036 435 407 % 23.1 25.8 10.8 10.1

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185155 %

910 1,031 22.4 25.4

377 9.3

471 11.6

(table continued on next page)

(table continued from previous page)

Year Ministry Law Medicine Education Commer 185660 1,112 1,226 367 610 % 22.2 24.4 7.3 12.2 186165 993 1,091 466 554 % 20.5 22.5 9.6 11.4 186670 764 1,193 351 587 % 17.2 27.9 7.9 13.3 187175 885 1,501 456 708 % 16.7 28.1 8.5 13.2 187680 845 1,498 564 967 % 13.6 23.8 9.1 15.5 188185 784 1,479 596 1,120 % 11.6 21.9 8.8 19.0 188690 889 1,526 612 1,464 % 11.6 19.9 8.0 19.1 189195 1,052 2,003 971 2,621 % 9.7 18.5 8.9 24.2 189600 865 2,264 956 3,871 % 5.9 15.6 6.6 26.7 TOTAL 15,017 20,813 8,086 14,878 1

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% 16.4 22.7 8.8 16.2 Note: Figures are for graduates of "college" departments only mouth, Dickinson, Williams, Union, Middlebury, Washington (IN), Haverford, Oberlin, De Pauw (IN), Bucknell, Beloit (W icago, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Pennsylvan of individual colleges, enrollments in various departments, an ates include (a) jobs not otherwise classified, (b) not employe Source: Bailey B. Burritt (1912), Professional Distribution of

Page 140

elite schools (e.g., Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University). The rise of business careers in Burritt's group is somewhat less than might be expected for the 1890s. The depression of 1893 may have had some impact here, but we should also be wary of the data for 18961900, because there were a large number of missing cases (18.9%) for this period. 3 Also, Burritt's aggregate data are for collegiate departments of colleges only (not professional departments).

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The growing number of unclassified students in the latter years of Burritt's study is perplexing. One may speculate, though, that unknown locations, students in graduate schools, entries of graduates into newer professions, and an increase in unemployed female graduates are partly responsible for this. In sum, Burritt's data suggest that the long-term trend in occupational placements of graduates involved smaller proportions of placements in the traditional professions of law, medicine, and ministry and greater proportions of graduates entering education, commerce, and, after the railroad-building era, engineering.

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Another set of aggregate data concerning student careers is contained in Burke's (1982) analysis of college careers between 1800 and 1860. Like Burritt, Burke studied data strictly pertaining to liberal arts graduates. The occupational classifications used in his study enable more precise location of graduates in education, business, and government. Unlike Burritt, Burke used up to four jobs that individuals had held in their careers and calculated percentages for given decades for those who "had ever held" particular jobs.4 Occupational data from college records were cross-referenced with available biographical materials from national, state, and county biographies and with similar sources compiled by professional and social organizations. The figures also are broken down by some individual schools and by geographical regions. It is unfortunate that Burke did not go on to document the employment histories of students in later decades. For this information we must rely

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on Burritt and on individual college statistics about their alumni. Regional, occupational, and time period (decade of college entry) data from Burke's study are depicted in Table 6.2. These data reaffirm some of Burritt's claims. Growth in the percentage of graduates who worked in business is the most pronounced pattern emerging from Burke's data. Burke indicates that business careers were more common than Burritt showed in his study, although the same general pattern of increasing business employment is apparent in both studies. In New England, Burke shows that 10% of the students entered business in the 1800s; by the 1850s, 32% of the students had worked in business. In the Middle Atlantic colleges, 6% of the students who entered college in

TABLE 6.2 Percentage of Students Who Ever Worked in Sel Occupations, by Decade of Entry into Regional Colleges, 180

REGION / Occupation 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s 1840s 1850 NEW ENGLAND Ministers 2 Lawyers 4 Physicians 1 All Business 1 Teachers 1 Agriculturalists MIDDLE ATLANTIC Ministers Lawyers Physicians All Business Teachers Agriculturalists SOUTH ATLANTIC Ministers Lawyers Physicians -

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All Business Teachers Agriculturalists SOUTHWEST Ministers Lawyers Physicians All Business Teachers Agriculturalists MIDWEST Ministers Lawyers Physicians All Business Teachers Agriculturalists Note: The states included in various regions are as follows: "N Atlantic": NJ, NY, PA; "South Atlantic'': DC, DE., GA, MD, TN, TX; "Midwest": IN, IL, IA, MI, MN, OH, WI. Within ea and Yale (New England); Princeton, Union, Columbia, and P lina, and Georgia (South Atlantic); Alabama (Southwest); Ob schools are tabulated separately in the source below. Data are which exceeded 40 student (including graduates and those wh

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Source: Colin Burke (1982), American Collegiate Population

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the 1810s had worked in business, whereas 25% of the 1850s group had held business jobs. Midwestern colleges were founded later and showed higher initial percentages of graduates in business (12% in the 1830s group); by the 1850s, 23% of students had worked in business. In southern colleges, business jobs were less common, but the same basic trend of increasing business employment unfolded over time. For economy of presentation, I have omitted the graduates of some (mainly elite) schools within each region. I should note that Burke's data on older, elite eastern schools are in agreement with Burritt's data in showing that these schools were heavily represented with graduates in business pursuits, even though it is likely that many of the individuals attending these schools would have entered business without college (e.g., in cases where their parents owned businesses). Burke's data on ministers supplement studies of the New England clergy and western

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missionaries, such as those conducted by Allmendinger (1975), Calhoun (1965), Goodykoontz (1939), and Tyack (1966). The proportions of students in ministerial occupations are highest among graduates who entered college in the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s; many of these persons likely became missionaries for western settlements. Even in later decades, ministry remained a common occupation of college graduates.

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As one might expect, the medical, legal, and educational professions were common occupational choices of college graduates in the early nineteenth century. New England colleges produced higher percentages of lawyers (45% in the 1800s and 31% in the 1810s) than colleges in other regions. Except for South Atlantic colleges, there were more early nineteenth-century graduates who became lawyers than doctors; qualifications for medical practices were available outside colleges (e.g., in medical schools and in self-training).

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The relatively high proportion of agriculturalist graduates in South Atlantic and Southwest colleges (over 20% among students of the 1840s and 1850s) probably reflects the elite status of plantation owners and their college-educated offspring in these regions. In New England and the Middle Atlantic states, the proportion of agriculturalists remained quite low (7% maximum for the entire 18001860 period). Midwestern collegians of the early mid-nineteenth century appear increasingly to have worked in agriculture between the student cohorts of the 1830s and the 1850s (6% and 16%, respectively). My purpose in the sections that follow will be to organize labor market changes, together with college recruitment strategies, into several general types. This will allow us to look past the idiosyncratic variations in occupational recruitment to the common mechanisms that drive educational degree-based credential expansion.

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Page 143

Formal Education and the Administration of Labor

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The primary differences between private practice professionals and professional bureaucrats have to do with variations in the nature and administration of their work. At the extreme end of professional work, are a well-organized group of colleagues who themselves determine tasks they will perform, how the tasks should be done, what constitutes the qualifications for engaging in their practice (along with internally and externally based organizational enforcement of such qualifications for practice), the clients to whom their products and/or services will be marketed, and the price of their labor. By contrast, bureaucrats are weakly organized workers in organizational hierarchies, engaged in work assigned to them by superiors. These workers have less control over qualifications for performing their jobs and less influence over recruitment of new workers. Their rewards for working are largely set by superiors. Finally,

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bureaucrats are less likely to deal directly with the clients who utilize their products or services.

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The primary concern in this study is with the formal education-based recruitment aspects of the nature and administration of work. Regarding educational credentials, I want to know to what extent workers themselves produce (1) a product (education-based competence and organizational loyalty), (2) a producer (the educational system), and (3) control over markets for the product (education-based hiring). The extent and historical timing of worker control over the above three aspects of their work has determined their organization as powerful and less powerful workers. Many groups, for example, have established education-based competence (1 and 2, above) without establishing or maintaining viable markets for trainees. 5 Other groups have established education-based competence without monopolizing schools as the only providers of such competence.6 Still other workers have gained control over markets for their labor not by creating a new product or a unique

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producer of the product, but by controlling markets for their labor through other means (e.g., coercive means).7 As Collins (1979) argued, some occupational tasks are more easily monopolized on the basis of formal education than others. The extent to which a task can be taught in formal schools, and only there, is a critical determinant of which jobs become objects of education-based monopolies. Sometimes it is not feasible for educational and labor market groups to organize control over job competence by school-taught means due to their inability to gain control of qualified teachers, prospective students, physical space, equipment, and so on.8 Collusion between labor market groups and educators is hindered where workers can seek infor-

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mal training and still get the same jobs or, from the perspective of educators, where competition from inexpensive educational enterprises drives down the profitability of such training. Formal educational training also is less likely where clients for degree-holding candidates perceive no added value in hiring formally educated versus otherwise trained workers (i.e., where the tasks performed seem not to require education-based technical ability or loyalty to the employer).

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In addition to the competence that education produces in workers, jobs that require organizational leaders (bureaucratic or professional) to trust workers to perform loyally (i.e., where coercive measures and rewards fail to guarantee worker compliance with organizational goals) are more likely to be administered on the basis of perceived status group (including educational group) loyalties. Professional group domination of markets for their products and services depends on members acting uniformly toward their clients so as not to generate either competition between professionals or public distrust of professional practice as a whole.

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Positions in bureaucratic organizations wherein compliance to organizational goals is difficult to insure are frequently filled by persons who can be expected to remain loyal either to a group that administers the organization (e.g., the college educated) or to an external group (the profession) that can be expected to levy sanctions on (often marginal) members should they fail to act "reasonably." The latter type of compliance is one in which higher administrators may hire professionals not merely because of their abilities or their licensed qualifications to deal effectively with the specific technical uncertainties of organizational operations (e.g., legal work), but also because such individuals (1) are more likely to be socialized to act responsibly in a given area of work, (2) are susceptible to policing of their actions by external organizations, and (3) are better able to interact with similar persons in external organizations. The risk bureaucrats face in hiring professionals, of course, is that such

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individuals may act in the interests of the profession rather than the bureaucratic organization. One may assume that where professionals are hired for bureaucratic work it is because they are the only ones who can do the work (because of technical and/or legally sanctioned competence) or because other technically competent persons are less likely to perform well in discretionary work settings. In occupations gained through the differential control of products, producers, and markets, several types of occupations emerge that range from pure bureaucrats who lack all control over products, producers, and markets, to bureaucratic professionals who control particular aspects of their work, to professionals who dominate all aspects of their

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employment. 9 I shall frame this discussion in terms of what governance various types of workers gain or lose over their work.

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Occupational groups that, at various points in time, have gained widespread dominance as sole practitioners of "needed" services lie at one polar extreme. The Medieval professorate, medical doctors in the United States after 1920, private practice lawyers in general, and the congregational ministry in the United States are examples of groups with rigid, collective action-based controls over their work. Abbott (1988) pointed out how powerful professional groups have been able to deal with competitor groups in their labor markets by subordinating these groups to less rewarding aspects of their practice (e.g., nursing in the medical field). In other cases, competitor groups have become allied as "specialties" with niches in the markets of powerful professional groups (e.g., in medicine, the case of psychiatry). Professional monopolies of practice are dynamic historical ventures that require organized attentiveness to the dangers innovators pose to markets for professional services and

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corrective actions. Strategies of coaptation of competitors in such markets tend to make modern professions differentiated, stratified systems of practice, accompanied by differential credentials for entry to labor markets and for subsequent movement through career ladders. Bureaucratic organizations stratify departments and positions within firms, whereas professional groups are stratified by domains of expertise in intraorganizational labor markets.

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Workers trained in professional schools or departments who are employed by private and public bureaucracies may be distinguished from independent professionals in that the former lose control of some aspects of their work to their superiors in bureaucratic administrations. Private sector professionals lose considerable control over markets for their services. Corporate engineers, accountants, lawyers, and researchers are common examples of such workers. These more weakly organized professionals are less likely to seek out on their own markets for their services, and are not charged with as much control over how to perform tasks, how to measure adequate performance, or what price to ask for their labor. While bureaucratic professionals usually work among colleagues with similar credentials, their coworkers are hired by superiors or by personnel officers who answer to the same superiors. The amount of interaction with similarly trained workers outside their firm (e.g., in written

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communications with professional organizations or in attending professional conferences) is minimal; these workers generate solidarity with similar others primarily within their workplace (or, in managementinitiated workshops that draw similar persons from other organizations). Some formally educated workers in bureaucracies are recruited to

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positions that largely or even exclusively involve public relations work. Like other bureaucratic professionals, these workers operate within decision-making hierarchies that weaken their influence over colleague recruitment, the selfinitiation of tasks, the price of their labor, and the judgement of adequate performance. A primary difference between these and other workers in such bureaucracies lies in the amount of their direct contact with and discretionary action toward special categories of clients, or in the most broad sense, the public. These workers are not so much highly qualified professional experts as they are persons with the ability to deal with the expectations of specific or general external organizational actors. Higher-level, nonelected public servants, public utilities officials, insurance agents, bank officers, and corporate salespeople are routinely required to interact with individuals, interest groups, or the public at large as competent and trustworthy

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servants of client interests. The educational credentials of such individuals vary according to the clientele served. Employers' assessments of workers' competency and trustworthiness is significantly based on employer recognition of clientele perceptions of appropriate educational backgrounds for acting in a given capacity. Thus, local businessmen in an Iowa town might consider Princeton graduates to be competent loan officers in banks (regardless of their majors in college), but hardly as trustworthy as graduates of the liberal arts college in Des Moines who have not cheated them in the past. The local bank benefits from hiring the person who solicits trust from its clients. Likewise, if an officer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) needs a Midwest regional director, it would be provident for the officer to select a person who, on the basis of educational background, would be likely to convince more farmers that USDA policies for growing less corn in

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their region were "for their own good"a University of Illinois graduate would work out better in this capacity than a University of Kansas graduate, who might be seen in the Midwest as a two-faced advocate of Plains-states wheat growers. 10

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In the twentieth-century United States, internal managers of subunits of bureaucratic organizations have comprised the largest sector of college-educated employees. We call this group "professional bureaucrats" because they independently (i.e., in separate firms and sometimes for different reasons) helped generate credentialism in their occupations. Still, the selection of workers from a pool of educationally qualified applicants (and, early on, otherwise qualified applicants) in this area remained the responsibility of superiors. Educational qualifications for managerial work always have been varied, ranging from business education to liberal arts degrees of all sorts. The primary reasons why education-based recruitment to managerial positions became prevalent

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were that these individuals were likely to possess basic communications skills, were more able to interact with similarly trained managers, and were sufficiently cosmopolitan to interact with various subordinates and external actors. Where superiors themselves were college graduates, control-based uncertainties also were reduced by hiring collegians of similar status groups. The varieties of managerial training have forestalled the formation of externally legitimized, expertise-based professional groups in managerial ranks. Monopolies of technical competence among managers largely are developed by individuals operating within the political structures of individual firms.

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Recruitment of college-educated persons to upper-level U.S. bureaucratic management became quite common by 1930. By the postWorld War II years, such hiring practices had extended downward to middle management in many businesses. Late twentieth-century recruitment trends in such organizations have extended the B.A. degree requirement to even lower ranges of organizational hierarchies, while simultaneously raising educational requirements for higher positions to post-graduate degrees. Because recruitment of college graduates to so many decision-making positions in U.S. bureaucracies appears to have been central to the expansion of higher education in this country, I shall comment further on the origins of this strategy later. Growth of Private Sector Managerial Credentialism

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A detailed consideration of private sector managerial work is worthwhile for our study for two reasons. First, this area of work became the predominant destination of more and more college graduates as the twentieth century passed. The other reason is that degree-based recruitment to managerial positions is less understood than the expansion of, for example, traditional professional education (understood as an degree-based labor market monopoly).

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Modern managerial work requires the ability to accomplish tasks effectively within contexts of hierarchical, rule-bound organizations. Leadership skills are associated with upper-level work of this sort, while loyalty to the organization and compliance with the demands of immediate superiors are expected for lower-level managers. The issue of loyalty and trustworthiness pertains primarily to the organization, not to a wider group of similar workers. Thus the exclusion of labor market competitors is geared more to workers within particular organizations. Much of the variability in degree requirements for holding various positions is attributable to the peculiar recruitment patterns of college gradu-

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ates within organizations and industrial sectors. Upper- and lower-level managers differ regarding the ease with which their performance can be directly measured. More routine tasks are delegated to lower-level managers; tasks whose competent performance is hard to judge are done by upper-level managers. Similarly, the work that lower-level managers do is far more likely to be given to them by superiors; upperlevel managers are required to be self-starters who initiate their own work. Self-initiated work carries with it the organizational risk of a variety of self-interested motives interfering with task performance. Recruitment to upper-level management is similar to professional recruitment in that workers of a particular type recruit their own colleagues, except that, again, recruitment is to a particular organization, rather than to a labor market (interlocking directorates, where education is a significant consideration for

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joining the group, is closer still to professional recruitment).

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The size and recruitment practices of U.S. managerial sectors differed from European organizations. In Germany, white-collar workers used the variegated examination system of the bureaucratic state as a model for their organization as a labor group (Kocka, 1980:148). Managerial hierarchies of German firms tended to be larger than those of Britain due to the capital-intensive industries in which they were involved. In England, the development of large managerial classes was forestalled by familial ownership and management of firms. British firms were concentrated in industries requiring relatively little capital or managerial hierarchy. Those British business leaders who were university graduates still numbered too few to drive higher educational expansion. American firms focused on industries with potential for economies of scale, thereby producing the necessary capital investment internally. The managerial sectors of American firms were even larger than those of

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German companies. U.S. white-collar workers, when they organized, modeled their labor groups after numerous, established American professional groups that were college trained (Chandler, 1986:5051). The implications of these differences for education-based recruitment of managers are that U.S. firms (1) needed more managers than elite families could supply, and (2) organizations were able to look to an extensive, standardized, and protracted degreebased credentialing structure that was already in place in the multiplicity of university-trained professional groups. A critical initial influence on the expansion of educational degree-based recruitment of U.S. business managers came from the responses made by a variety of firms to the problems of geographical expansiveness, functional diversification within their firms, and the uncertainties

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associated with operating within more than one market (e.g., markets for raw materials, production equipment, product sales, services, credit, and labor). The central offices of expansive railroad companies in the 1860s were likely the first to begin nationwide recruitment of college graduates for administrative work in their organizations (e.g., as agents along their lines), although such companies generally considered other types of credentials more important than college degrees (Chandler, 1965; Licht, 1983). By the early twentieth century, new forms of organization in giant corporations produced new needs for managers. Chandler (1962) provided a classic analysis of the development of innovative multidivisional organizational structures in firms such as Dupont; Sears, Roebuck Company; and General Motors Corporation. These originally centralized firms created centralization at the divisional level in order to make high-level divisional managers more

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autonomous both from other divisions of the organization and from the routine problems faced by their subordinates in dealing with designated domains of market uncertainty. Managers within this structure were more free to spend time communicating with other managers and coordinating actions. The degree of discretion given to such managers greatly increased as communications from other divisions of the organization were cast less as directives and more as abstract goals. Centralization of authority at the divisional level was more than just an innovation that solved a problemit was an innovation that allowed managers to think about and act on abstract organizational problems (i.e., it allowed managers to continuously innovate in search of routines that would gain them market controls (Stinchcombe, 1990:10051).

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Although I am not interested in explaining organizational innovation in business enterprises per se, these innovations afford perhaps the best demonstrations of the recruitment problems that became more pronounced (for different reasons) in a host of bureaucratic workplaces from the 1890s onward. The problem many employers increasingly faced was how to find numerous employees who could be expected (1) to be able to perform abstract tasks that involved writing and communication within and across socioeconomic groups, and (2) to work loyally in the interests of the organization, rather than in self-interest, even when circumstances permitted the latter.

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The size of a business organization is one predictor of the extent of delegation of authority. Businesses that operate in numerous markets, such as those Chandler studied, are more likely to employ large numbers of persons in fiduciary roles. Table 6.3, taken from a survey conducted in 1928 of over 7,000 business leaders, suggests that the largest

TABLE 6.3 Percentage of College Graduates among Business Leaders, by Position and Size of Business in Which Employed, 1928

Size of Business Subordinate Chief Partner All (gross annual income) Executive Executive or Owner Position $50,000,000 and over $5,000,000 to 49,999,000 $1,000,000 to 4,999,000 $500,000 to 999,000 less than $500,000
ALL SIZES

Note: These percentages are based on a sample of 7,371 busin sion in this study on the basis of being business "leaders" of n the basis of information contained in Poor's Registry of Direc portation, industry, etc., along with miscellaneous other sourc and non-business education, present age and age at entry to po Source: F. W. Taussig and C. S. Joslyn (1932), American Bus tion, pp. 55, 184.

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organizations (defined by gross annual income) we subordinate executive positions. In firms with over utives and 39.6% of subordinate executives held co gross annual income, between 28.1% and 30.9% of 26.5% and 35.2% of chief executives in these busin the largest firms also were more likely themselves t the smallest businesses surveyed).

The premium that organizational structures such as that delegated authority by alternative means, place ber of positions that larger organizations needed to guaranteeing loyalty of managers (e.g., family or et equate previous performance of similar tasks (from strong basis for managerial recruitment, younger m taken from the ranks of college graduates.

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Executives of the early twentieth century sometimes complained of the lack of basic business skills (e.g., bookkeeping) of collegians, but in the arena of the social skills that were so important to committee work and interactions with diverse external organizations and clients, college men had a decided advantage over older, noncollege-trained managers. In 1930 Taussig and Joslyn (1932:296307) surveyed business executives on the role of education in their careers. Their comments are instructive:
College associations have been of great assistance in business dealings and relations with men. In college I played varsity football and managed the Glee Club. [The] best training for life work was in college activities outside the curriculum.

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I sadly deplore the fact that I have had no education. I am a success financially but find that the lack of education has made me timid socially.

Another executive argued the virtues of collegiate experience in delegating authority:

I have three sons all of whom I am sending through college as I know from my own experience that college educated men and women too, are much better equipped to discharge in an efficient manner the duties and responsibilities of high and important office, than are those who are not college educated.

Other executives lamented their competitive disadvantages against more educated individuals:
[I] have always sincerely regretted the limited opportunities for school training It has been very difficult to compete with others who have had these advantages. [My] lack of educational training made early progress slow. It probably set me back 10 years.

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It has taken long hours and hard work on my part to overcome the handicap of a limited school education, and to properly conduct and at a profit the affairs of this firm. The business would have progressed more rapidly and more soundly if headed by a college trained man.

The analytical abilities required of managers were lauded by a business educator/executive at a Stanford University conference on business education in 1926:

Page 152 The real business of education . . . is to do something to the mind and character of the student which will enable him to function more successfully as a business man than he otherwise would. . . . The educated man . . . should be able to choose from among several ideas the one best suited to the purpose. Mental resourcefulness and sound judgement should be the objectives of education, especially in its later stages, as distinguished from training, the objective of which is mere skill (Bossard & Dewhurst, 1931:99).

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Again, there is a reference to the idea of ''sound judgement." This requirement seldom is mentioned for lower-level participants in organizations. The implication of the term is that managers and executives are enmeshed in a variety of uncertain situations that require more than just routine responses. These positions frequently require actors to perform reasonably given the exigencies of their place in the structure of the organization (i.e., to deal with technical complexities and to act in organizational interests). In 1927, one business educator emphasized the need for college men to be "educators" of subordinates:

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[It] is easy to reach the conclusion that the college graduate, if he expects promotion into the ranks of junior executive and then later on to more important executive positions, must have acquired an unusual ability to deal with other men, which is in most respects an educational or training activity (Bossard & Dewhurst, 1931:104).

The ability of the college graduate employed in lower management "to deal with other men" in a training capacity enabled him to advance himself through the organization (by getting others to work for him, thus pleasing his superiors) and also enabled him to gain compliance from those who sought advancement through training and promotion.

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The technical aspects of written and oral communications facilities are well evidenced in the complaints executives made about some of their managers. These complaints probably were launched most by executives who had received liberal arts training (as opposed to commercial college education). An executive at one of the nation's largest financial institutions expressed similar concerns even about the many liberal arts college graduates in his organization. His solution was to hire a former professor of English to review letters and reports produced by his employees (Bossard & Dewhurst, 1931:106107). The problem of technical facility in communications was especially important for public sector bureaucracies. An executive in a major public utilities system wrote:

We find the business and engineering graduates we empl alive to our commercial and technical problems, and will ligible reports, or even letters, and when it comes to even plete "busts" (Bossard & Dewhurst, 1931:106)!

It is not surprising that this comment should come f izations recruited college graduates in larger propor drawn from Newcomer's (1955) sample of business that 46.3% of public utility officers in 1925 had col and 39.1% of railroad officers. The relatively high r agement were evident even in 1900. Another survey National Electric Light Association showed that 6% lic utilities work (Bossard & Dewhurst, 1931:44). O percentage than public utilities work. Public utilitie engineering graduates. The same survey indicated t

TABLE 6.4 Higher Education of Officers in Three Types of Business, 190 Some College College Type of Business 1900 1925 1900 1925 1900 1925 1900 1925 Railroad 42.9 49.2 3 Public Utility 45.8 63.0 3

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Industrial

34.2 49.2 2 TOTAL 39.3 51.5 2 Note: Percentages for "some college education" include colle undergraduate and graduate degrees. "Graduate" degree progr education for admission. In engineering, the total percentages total percentages of graduate degrees were 4.9 in 1900 and 8. 1900 (no information on 6 cases) and 326 in 1925 (no inform Source: Mabel Newcomer (1955), The Big Business Executiv

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men graduating from 21 engineering colleges entered public utilities, a percentage higher than that for any other type of industry. The likely reasons for the higher rates of college recruitment of managers in this sector are associated not only with delegation of authority (especially at geographical distances), but also with maintaining a public image of disinterestedness in monopoly enterprisessimilar to professional monopolies. In addition, it is possible that the recruitment of college graduates would facilitate beneficial interactions with other college-educated individuals at the regulatory agencies that made public utilities monopolies possible.

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Educational groups and labor market groups cooperated in erecting barriers to entry to various business occupations. Frequently, former businessmen who later engaged in college teaching and administration formed the organizational centers for professionalization movements in business organizations. Persons still involved in day-to-day business life, after all, were relatively atomized in individual firms.

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Groups that advocated the implantation of business education in colleges and universities in the 1890s and early 1900s faced the problem of the persisting presence of competitor business schools such as the private, proprietary business colleges that had existed at least since the Civil War and, newer to the scene, the business programs offered in public and private secondary schools. These competitors offered cheap, shortterm, practical training in routine business operations. Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, for example, was a private 2-year secondary school with a good reputation for training students in the basic principles and technologies of business. The Drexel program included courses in commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping, penmanship, banking and finance, typewriting, business printing and advertising, public speaking, English composition, foreign languages, and civics. The Drexel offerings probably included more liberal arts courses than most business schools

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during this period, but otherwise the program is representative of the types of practical training that were readily available outside 4-year colleges. Another problem that innovators in college business education faced was skepticism on the part of many business leaders about the value of college education for working in business. Older businessmen especially doubted the practicality of college preparation for business. The ideology of the "self-made man" was popular among businessmen who entered their careers in the late nineteenth century. College men frequently were said to be too "soft" for the hard realities of business competition (Kirkland, 1956:102103). For other business leaders, college men were attractive prospects for lower management precisely because they possessed a "gentlemanly

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demeanor" that was seen as useful in interactions with other "gentlemen" within and outside firms. These recruiters frequently spoke of the need for men of character, which, as they saw it, was something colleges fostered in students (Kirkland, 1956:7172). Furthermore, these businessmen tended to see "practicality" in educational preparation as ''over-specialization," which detracted from individuals' abilities to manage and innovate.

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It is probable that the split in business community attitudes about the worth and proper content of college business education was determined by generational ideologies and by the type of positions to which business leaders sought to recruit college graduates. Older, noncollege-trained leaders within smaller firms that delegated less authority to managers sought practical education in or out of colleges. Younger, college-educated leaders in larger firms favored general or abstract college business education because of the complexity of the tasks facing autonomous managers (including interactions with "gentlemen") and because of the trust they felt they could place in members of their own status group.

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Proponents of college business education also faced the problem of getting such programs accepted by college faculties, administrators, and students. The first permanent business education program located in a higher educational institution was the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, founded in connection with the University of Pennsylvania in 1881. From the very beginning, Wharton had a significant liberal arts component to its curriculum; it also placed greater emphasis on analytical aspects of business than, for example, Drexel Institute, which was founded in the same city at a later date. Wharton was very much a training ground for founders of leading university-level business programs throughout the country. 11

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The 1890s was a period of great agitation for new forms of business education. The International Congress of Education, held at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition, included business education as a major part of its program. In the following years, the National Education Association published numerous monographs on the same topic. The influential Committee of Ten, appointed by this organization, warned that advocates of practical business education would find stiff opposition among college faculty; the Committee advised that the humanities would need to form a significant part of business education in higher education. While much of the initiative for business education during the 1890s was aimed at establishing programs in routine business procedures within public high schools, colleges and universities also were objects of speculation about managerial education (Kirkland, 1956:7680).

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Establishment of business schools in colleges and universities became more common in the 1910s and 1920s. Almost everywhere, attempts to start business programs met with opposition from faculty who feared such programs would usurp their power position within the university. College administrators often themselves were liberal arts graduates who doubted the place of business education in their institutions, especially given the risks such ventures entailed should they fail to compete with similar education in other types of schools. Where business schools made headway in colleges and universities in the early 1900s, a compromise usually was struck between the promoters of such programs and power groups within higher education. Business education gained entry to colleges by placing considerable emphasis on "character-building" curricula in the liberal arts. In addition, many commercial courses within business majors represented the cutting edge of

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business education: foreign trade, statistics and business cycles forecasting, business organization and management, personnel administration, industrial psychology, accounting, business ethics, and so on (Bossard & Dewhurst, 1931:283334). Liberal arts faculty were less opposed to curricula that included their courses, and college administrators were more satisfied with programs that sought to gain control over distinct market niches for "managerial," as opposed to ''practical" education.

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At the same time that business educators and employers stressed the inclusion of curricula that provided abstract knowledge, they came to speak of a distinct "profession" of business administration. Graduates of the new, college-affiliated business schools still competed with traditional liberal arts graduates for management positions in bureaucratic organizations. Business school graduates did, of course, usually enter management, but they did not effectively close off the market for such positions to traditional liberal arts graduates. What college business schools and their graduates did accomplish, however, was a significant exclusion of high school and private business education graduates from the most rewarding positions in business organizations. Peculiarities of the U.S. Higher Civil Service

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The American higher civil service was less elitist than its European counterparts, although positions within the higher civil service were objects of patronage politics (the "spoils" system) until the Pendleton Act of 1883 instituted some measure of "meritocratic" reform on the basis of competitive examinations for nonelected civil service offices (Skowronek, 1982). Administration of the American state did not provide as much of

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a model for business administration and managerial recruitment as did European governments (Chandler, 1977:204205). From an educational standpoint, European higher civil service workers were drawn from elite higher educational institutions (e.g., the grand coles of France, the "Oxbridge" connection in England, the gymnasia-trained university students in Germany), whereas U.S. higher civil servants were recruited by a variety of means, only one of which was affiliation with an "elite" college (so far as these colleges existed). The early and thoroughgoing interpenetration of state and economic leadership in Europe had no counterpart in America prior to 1930, nor did the U.S. state regulate economic growth as much as did European states.

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Formalization of recruitment policies in the U.S. Civil Service awaited the creation of a specialized personnel department. The development of an examination system by the U.S. Civil Service Commission for entry to various positions represented the implantation of a European model of organizational recruitment on peculiar U.S. circumstances. In Europe, mastery of the content of elite college education was a well-known prerequisite to candidates' passing examinations for higher offices. In the United States, being college educated did not give the individual an overwhelming advantage in passing such examinations until the 1930s. The design of civil service examinations in the early years, especially those for clerical workers, was geared toward candidates who merely had completed a common school education. The Civil Service Commission maintained a very guarded stance regarding the worth of college or even secondary education for passing exams. It was the

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"revealed utility of the education, not the credentials themselves" that was critical to gaining offices (DiPrete, 1989:85). Still, the Commission wavered on the issue of the benefits of higher education to aspirants to higher positions through promotion:
the best informed and most meritorious of those who enter it [the civil service] will be likely to win the higher prizes through promotion when once the merit system for admission shall be fairly established. And though the higher education is not necessary in order to gain admission to the public service, it will nevertheless prove its value in the mastery of the principles and methods of that service, and so gain higher consideration, and give increased power to those who possess it (DiPrete, 1989:85).

Most of the Commission's efforts to control promotions proved ineffective; promotion was an area where patronage persisted and where decisions usually were made by agency directors (DiPrete, 1889:90).

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For their part, many college graduates hesitated to enter the higher civil service until the 1930s. From 1884 to 1896, about 11.5% of competi-

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tors taking examinations in all branches of the federal service had received some college training. In 1897, 23.8% of those persons appointed to departmental service in Washington (where there was a significant concentration of highlevel positions) had attended college (Van Riper, 1958:165). Government service paid poorly compared to corporate managerial work. University professors strongly advised their students to avoid jobs in the federal government. However, one incentive for college graduates to take government jobs was that such work certified workers as responsible, public-spirited individuals (this certification especially made sense given the low pay of public service work). This notion of honor and economic disinterestedness may have been useful for the later employment of civil servants in more financially rewarding, discretionary positions in the private sector. The connections made in government service also benefited workers who later entered private

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sector workplaces that were dependent on the government, for example, organizations subjected to regulation by the federal government (DiPrete, 1989:125).

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In the 1930s, large numbers of college graduates entered the civil service. The initial incentive to such employment appears to have been the pressures the Great Depression placed on college graduates' labor markets. Federal jobs were generally perceived to be more secure than the occupations college graduates typically entered. The number of college graduates produced in the first few decades of the century was difficult for failing or endangered businesses to absorb. In addition to labor market incentives, Roosevelt's New Deal administration advocated the professionalization of higher administrative offices. Major universities held conferences on college training for public service and the federal government charged the Commission of Inquiry on Public Service Personnel with the task of producing influential reports supporting the notion of higher administration as a universitytrained profession (DiPrete, 1989:12637).

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Even very high-level civil servants evidenced credential inflation in the 1920s and 1930s. A survey of selected high-level federal administrators who entered their jobs in the 1920s and 1930s indicated older, more highly educated individuals (over 50% held degrees beyond the B.A.) moved into the upper reaches of the federal service in these decades. About 40% of persons entering similar jobs in the 1910s were college graduates, but only 14% held degrees past the B.A. (Bendix, 1949:3241). One of the main differences between upperlevel administrative work in the federal government and similar work in private bureaucracies was the formalization of entry requirements in government by way of examinations that did not require knowledge learned in colleges. This fact

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pushed the importance of college education into less formalized promotional considerations. Promotion in business likely rested on similar informal selection of college graduates, but businesses also maintained informal college degree barriers for entry to many higher offices. The expansion of administrative responsibilities in government in the early twentieth century created recruitment problems similar to those encountered by many businesses. Functional and geographic differentiation in both types of organizations demanded literate, trustworthy individuals in positions of authority. Despite the absence of a formal educational monopoly of higher government administration, agency heads faced problems of finding a large pool of technically competent, socially cosmopolitan, trustworthy workers to fill recurring vacancies at regional and local offices.

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Conclusion: The Abstraction of Graduates' Status Honor Weber (1916) provided a classic treatment of modern vs. traditional higher education in his discussion of the differences between the Confucian education of the Chinese literati as an "end in itself" (cultivation of an "essence" or state of "being'') and Puritan education in the West as a means to an end ("salvation" and, associated with this end, efficacy in worldly affairs). One may readily understand the technical needs of modern employers for literate administrators or of modern professionals for individuals who possess requisite technical skills for professional practice. One also should recognize that recruitment of college people to positions involves social control of incumbents of positions. What exactly is it that status group membership contributes to the social control of workers?

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Weber also perceived the increasing abstractness of social "credit" relationships. Most notably in his essay "The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism," Weber (19061923) argued that in America it no longer was membership in any particular sect that gained one economic and political advantages, but membership in any respectable sect. American colleges, likewise, originally were embodiments of sectarian/ethnic solidarities that, by the early twentieth century, had shorn their sectarian identities in favor of more universal currencymerit-based B.A. degrees signifying scientism, standardized content, and impersonal, rule-bound evaluation. I should not exaggerate the impersonality of modern higher education, but the fact remains that there is considerably greater impersonality in twentieth-century colleges than in colleges of the mid-nineteenth

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century. Colleges were, and still are, "agencies for the production of agents" (i.e., institutions that produce trustworthy candidates for labor marketsand other risky social and economic relations such as marriages), but the social bases of "trust" had shifted to far less salient groups by the twentieth century. As Shapiro (1987) pointed out, recruiters must trust not only individual candidates for jobs, but also the "guardians of trust'' (the college system) who certify candidates as good prospects. Trust became, in Granovetter's (1973; 1985) terminology, less "embedded" in networks of small social groups and more universal as an attribute of individuals who had passed through a macrolevel institutional process. This is not to say that microlevel, embedded social and economic interactions ceased to be at the foundation of collegiate experience; obviously, these interactions form the basis for macrolevel outcomes. Rather, the abstractness of modern credentialing lies in the

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trust that employers place in candidates they don't know much about (sociologically), save for their membership in a very large "community." Given their circumstances, recruiters' calculations of the probability that candidates will work out usually are quite rational, despite the fact that they do not judge the "merit" of individuals qua individuals (which often would be inefficient, e.g., in the first stages of narrowing a large pool of applicants for interviews).

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If traditional status groups consisted of overt members of hereditary groups, the status honor of the college graduate of the early twentieth century was that of a "qualified expert," despite all evidence that job performance may have had more to do with social factors than with the technical expertise gained in schools. By the early twentieth century, college education was defined by meritorious processes of admission, instruction, and evaluation. The construction of a "merit" system in education and in occupational recruitment ideologies lent much to the extension of the benefits of educational credentialism to new groups, but the net result of such an extension still amounted to little more than the creation of privileged stratum of managers and professionals defined to themselves and to the public as individuals possessing inherent "abilities" that gained them positive judgements in a just system of education-based evaluation and occupational recruitment. Employer needs for

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solidarity and compliance in a variety of new occupational settings encouraged the development of a more expansive and abstract system of status group formation. Employers came to hire college graduates because such individuals were more likely to cooperate on the basis of economic and political interests (because they were closer to employers in terms of social class), but not only for this reason. This fact would explain little about why in-

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creasing numbers of college-educated people vs. non-college-educated, well-to-do people were hired. Participation in college created beliefs in commonality (often cast in opposition to the crass "economic interests" of less enlightened individuals) that transcended, yet were beneficial to, economic pursuits of groups. Higher educational experience produced in graduates a nested set of behavioral traits that could, and sometimes did, transcend social class, religious affiliation, and ethnicity. Furthermore, the "mark of education," as Weber called it, became recognizable in the day-to-day interactions of holders of degrees and nonholders alike. Educational culture was significantly shaped by the needs of employers for obedient workers, but just as important was the solidarity such culture formed among particular workers in bureaucracies (i.e., against less formally educated coworkers and against superiors in general).

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College-educated people originally came to predominate in advantageous positions for several reasons. The technical requirements of work in such positions did change and college-educated people actually were better suited to perform in these environments. Advantaged groups always predominated in rewarding positions and advantaged groups were best suited to spend time and money on higher education. Colleges themselves did much to expand their enrollments without abiding attention to labor market needs. Thus, at the outset, higher percentages of college-educated individuals would have entered higher management and the professions than would have entered other occupations. Younger managers of the early twentieth century were more highly educated than older managers partly for this reason. It is likely that these younger managers and professionals used their educational experience as a distinguishing trait as they attempted to move up organizational

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ladders and as they excluded others from professional labor markets. Once educational qualifications were used in recruitment, incumbents of credentialed positions used their powers to expand and institutionalize the qualifications for holding offices. Educational credentials provided not only a first-order consideration regarding recruitment (i.e., a "first cut"), but also a criterion for recruitment-related decision making by default. The promulgation of meritocratic ideologies of placement and promotion across a wide spectrum of workplaces also encouraged the selection of highly educated individuals, especially when other measures of competence were relatively equal (and college graduates undoubtedly were quick to point out this "plus" in their favor).

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As Weber argued, the technical requirements of modern organizations resulted not in a disinterested class of "experts," but in a large, advantaged group of administrators and professionals. Stratification by educational credentials represents a distinct analytical level of inequal-

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ity in the United States and elsewhere. It was in the United States, however, that this structure of power reached its fullest development as a complex constellation of employer and worker interests. Modern credential stratification, with its marked dimension of abstract status honor, interfaces not only with labor markets, but also with the full spectrum of economic markets (credit, commodity, housing, etc.) and political organizations as a fundamental determinant of life chances.

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7 Conclusion: Conceptualizing Twentieth-Century Trajectories

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Fundamental structural and cultural features of educational expansion and credentialism crystallized by the 1930s. Recruitment of collegeeducated bureaucratic and professional labor was entrenched and spreading to new positions in government, business, and client-based practices, in each case guided by the combined forces of increasing workplace hiring uncertainties and worker-initiated labor market monopoly movements. Enrollment increases continued at stratified levels, first spurred by the growth of state normal colleges (after World War II), and later (beginning in the 1960s) driven by the founding and subsequent growth of thousands of public, 2-year junior or community colleges and technical schools. The phenomenal rate of enrollment growth in the early decades of the twentieth century was matched and sometimes exceeded in later decades, guided by continued credentialing of positions and incorporation of new class, ethnic, and racial groups within less

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prestigious sectors of the higher educational system. Neither early philanthropic nor later federal government influence over higher education sought in significant measure to limit overall system growth. Periodic backlash movements, often led by educators, nevertheless sought to limit and segregate enrollment growth, or to reaffirm dominant group values in "core" pedagogical content. Land-speculative collegefounding interests, an early source of college growth, persisted as a factor in college founding throughout the twentieth century, but this motive no longer was a critical determinant of the continued growth of U.S. higher education. 1

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Earlier I discussed the cultural and governmental forces that impinged on the development of U.S. credentialism, but I deliberately centered on actions and structures within labor markets and educational institutions. The relatively short treatment of federal government influence on higher educational expansion and credentialism stemmed from evidence suggesting rather limited governmental control of higher educational policy prior to World War II. The consideration of cultural forces

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also was circumscribed. Public perceptions of the legitimacy of occupational credentials, popular beliefs about educational opportunity, and the organizational cultures of colleges themselves were mainly dealt with as each interfaced with educational expansion and credentialism. The increasingly standardized, rational organization of colleges and the competition among schools were primarily covered in the context of sectarian college founding and the efforts of various controlling organizations to form a stratified educational system (Chapters 4 and 5, respectively).

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In concluding, several critical issues concerning late twentieth-century credentialism deserve discussion in light of the foregoing analysis: (1) the general cultural character of U.S. higher education, (2) the nature of institutional competition and rationalization, and (3) the enhanced role of federal government in educational expansion policy and labor economics. The Multivalent Culture of Credentialism

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Currently, there is a veritable renaissance of cultural analysis taking place in the social sciences. 2 It may appear odd to some readers that the present study, which contains a marked Weberian orientation, is less a cultural history than an analysis of the macrolevel transformations of social structures. It was, after all, Weber (19041905) who sought to show that the autonomous cultural forces embedded in Protestant asceticism encouraged the emergence of rational capitalism in the West.3 But even Weber's cultural analysis was rather limited, considering his painstaking comparative studies of the economic and political forces that launched and sustained modern societies.

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Earlier I noted the role of religious traditions in initiating U.S. higher educational expansion, along with the development of peculiar beliefs among students and employers concerning the worth of college degrees for employment. At this point, the broader cultural character of late twentieth-century U.S. higher educational expansion and credentialism are worth noting. Several intertwined public beliefs concerning higher education developed partly as a consequence of early expansive credentialism: (1) the legitimacy of educational degrees as prerequisites for holding selected positions; (2) the rights to educational access, "opportunity" for success, and timely promotion through levels of the educational system; and (3) the technical practicality of higher education for occupational and other real-world performance, set against the intrinsic worth of additional education. These beliefs best are understood

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Page 165

within the context of waves of expanded educational access and corollary changes in the cultural content of pedagogy. 4

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Participants' evaluations of the worth of higher education may be more or less consciously related to the material benefits of credentialing capacities and, depending on this cognizance, expressive of varying degrees of practical vs. abstract cultural content. Groups excluded from higher education generally have been prone to overestimation of the practical elements of higher educational culture. Groups who hold higher degrees are more familiar with educational impracticality, owing to the fact that they have better experience of the technical irrelevance of their own educational experiences for job performance. Nevertheless, degree holders usually have materially benefited from the historical credentialing system they passed through (also, from their inherited socioeconomic positions). The socio-psychological dimension of these varying levels of participation is that, in the credential order, winners and losers alike tend to endow the system with legitimacy although,

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again, the perception and content of legitimacy varies based on whether the individual's vantage point is one of inclusion or exclusion.

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Many Americans support greater access to higher education with only remote knowledge of the exact jobs such participation secures. This support persists despite convincing evidence that expansionary educational reforms have failed to alter wider disparities in economic and political orders (Jencks, 1972). The overall legitimacy of educationally sanctioned U.S. occupational monopolies seldom has faced organized challenge from groups underepresented in such work. Rather, the trend has been toward ever-increasing mobilization of various occupational groups and the consequent exclusion or subordination of their closest competitors, that is, at segmented, stratified levels of the occupational structure (Abbott, 1988; Wilensky, 1964a). Prospective high school teachers holding B.A. degrees are less worried about their formal exclusion from university teaching than the possibility of M.A. degree high school teaching candidates gaining an upper hand in their labor

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markets. Demands for educational access and quality also have been limited to particular arenas. Despite the fact that educationally disempowered groups are concentrated in schools that offer less prestigious, less occupationally marketable degrees, there has been relatively little agitation by this population for access to "equal schools" at the collegiate level (as opposed to primary and secondary educational access/funding reform movements). Thus, the cultural legitimacy of educational degrees rests in disjointed belief sectors that reflect the historical appeasement of educational demands and relative positioning in educational and labor markets.

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When the cultural content of education changes, it is not merely the entry of large numbers of previously excluded students to higher education that is the crucial determinant of change. Rather, it is the level of organization such populations possess and direct toward schools, government, media, and so on that is decisive to the timing, location, and content of reforms. Recurrent historical struggles to "define the core" of higher educational instruction have featured various hegemonic educational groups in conflict with new educational participants brought in by a bewildering variety of forces (e.g., college enrollment-boosting strategies, changes in public educational access policies, collective mobility movements of disprivileged groups, and changes in faculty social demographics and research specialties). Increased levels of consciousness, competition, and conflict between occupational groups and classes foster agitation for restoration or reform of "general education"

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("core'' pedagogy) as a monopolizable culture. 5 The entry of diverse members and their subsequent battles with dominant educational groups has originated within single institutions, geographical regions, cities, and so on (at times, taking on the character of "showdown" battles in wellknown educational centers), followed by more vigorous outbreaks in similarly structured locations.6

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The cultural character of U.S. higher education long has mixed elements of instrumental rationality with less pragmatic "principles" and "values." Although virtually all higher educational institutions are organized along highly bureaucratic lines, their rationality is not manifested in simple, unmediated, practicality. Esoteric, exclusionary cultural production is integral to credentialism. The actors involved in such cultural production include individuals directly involved in labor market hiring processes (e.g., student consumers, or organizational recruiters who seek to influence educational contenttwo groups frequently at odds concerning the worth of practical vs. general education), and factions within the educational system itself, who maneuver for various advantages within their own labor markets in universities, foundations, and government bureaus. Wherever possible, these groups use ideologies of "usefulness" or inherent "value" to buttress their organizational interests.

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Surges of educational expansion send shock waves through interestbound segments of such organizations, producing complex alliances and contestations over cultural elements of higher educational reform. Variations in educational emphasis on practicality or esoterica, teaching or research, aristocratic or democratic access, and so on result from these conflicts. The ambivalence of educational value perhaps is best summed up in the old adage that education is "one thing they can't take away from

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you." A pragmatic interpretation of this phrase might read, "get more education, then wait to see if it helps you in job changes." People become outdated and incompetent, get fired, or laidoff; still, they carry credential capital to their next job, perhaps with an edge over others for future hiring and in promotions where decisions are made by default. On the other hand, the statement suggests a belief in education as an end in itself (i.e., as a cultural value beyond, and even in opposition to, concrete economic interests). The latter valuation of education, of course, has been instrumental in the historical formation and solidarity of status groups of all sorts, including those groups that have sought occupational privileges through marketable, educationally induced culture. Tiered Educational Competition and Rationalization

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Competition pervades not only labor markets, but also market relations between American colleges and universities (Trow, 1988:1617). This trait, more extensive in the United States than elsewhere, has been present for two centuries. Higher educational institutions have competed for students, external support, faculty, occupational placements, and prestige. Closely associated with this competition has been a high degree of standardization of higher educational structure and culture. For nearly a century, critics have attacked this development for providing "needless duplication" of educational services. 7 From the viewpoint of critics, it is paradoxical that the very rationality that has come to characterize individual institutions begets irrationality at the system level, where competition between schools and emulation of leading universities leads to inefficiency in imitator organizations. Embedded in many such objections are misgivings about the diversity and expansiveness of

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U.S. higher education, coupled with so-called "quality issues." From this perspective, U.S. higher education has become, as Alexis de Tocqueville (1840) prophesied about other spheres of American life, an institution beset with a culture of mediocrity. No one familiar with current educational administration would question the tendency of colleges to imitate the policies of other institutions. Educators learn cultural dispositions of this sort early in their training, but these propensities for action only come to fruition within plausible structural contexts. Our understanding of institutional competition and standardization awaits detailed analysis of the complex variations within each phenomenon. Competition between U.S. higher educational institutions has varied historically in terms of the scope, form, and content of the competition. Thus, institutional competition has never resulted

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in a simple war of all against all. Similarly, institutional differences persist, suggesting that the notion of a monolithic higher educational culture is premature.

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Some historical changes in individual institutions, and even of given types of institutions, toward the structures and cultures of schools popularly defined as most prestigious are evident, but these institutional changes have not been as thoroughgoing or upwardly mobile as one might suppose. Educational expansion tends to render such mobility less significant due to the relatively unchanging system stratification. Normal schools are perhaps the most plausible examples of institutions that became similar to schools "above" them, but even their supposed transformation into comprehensive "universities" obscures the fact that many normal colleges originally were similar to colleges that later became ''research universities." If one were to look at the University of Illinois (a land-grant institution) and Illinois State Normal College, first in 1890, then in 1990, the two organizations would appear strikingly similar at each point in time. Teacher education often was only a component

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of normal school programs, rather than the definitive purpose of such organizations (Herbst, 1989). Community or junior colleges are another possible example of emulation and mobility. These institutions originated in high schools as "departments" that later became separate collegiate institutions (Labaree, 1988). 8 But today, community colleges are not becoming simple clones of 4-year institutions, despite the significant student transfer function community colleges serve for some universities (typically, less notable public universities). Indeed, it is common for actors in community colleges deliberately to distinguish their "mission" ("teaching") from goals they often perceive as the bane of university education ("research").

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The historical sources of competition among U.S. colleges, universities, and secondary schools were discussed previously (in Chapters 3 and 5): state laissez-faire policies, religious denominationalism, and ongoing enrollment shortages each encouraged institutional competition. Later, beginning in the 1890s, regional accreditation associations and private philanthropic monitoring organizations drastically changed the nature of college competition by defining and differentially funding schools as stratified institutional types that increasingly resembled one another in terms of form and content. Thus, the original thrust for educational rationalization was externally imposed on institutions, rather than born of a mysterious proclivity for "emulation" in educators' minds.

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A crucial consequence of this external mandate for standardization was that, from then on, colleges tended to compete within the parameters of market niches. These markets were segmented, but within each mar-

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ket emerged uniform types of student recruitment, job placement, faculty training and disposition (e.g., teacher vs. researcher identities), and measures of organizational prestige. The location of institutions in given markets, and the associated organizational cultures of schools, is significantly a consequence of the historical era when the institutions were founded (e.g., during peak founding periods public normal schools, state land-grant universities, private research universities, community colleges, etc.). 9 Within these segmented markets, higher educational organizations have relatively similar resources, whereas across markets institutional resources are different in kind. The costs and risks of innovation for schools embedded in such markets are high, so it is not surprising to find considerable similarity among institutions in given markets. Competition within markets is minimized where the benefits of being in such markets are sufficient to be equally distributed among

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oligopolistic organizations, which carefully guard market borders against intrusion (often, against organizations driven or excluded from other educational markets). This fact suggests, again, that institutional competition is neither random nor universal; the scope and nature of such competition varies historically as a consequence of market position.

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Recall the importance of "agency" structures to the development of credentialism. Agency relations interplay with enrollment expansion and curricular reform to foster externally initiated demands for standardization. Heterogenous expansion and stratification of higher education produces specific difficulties for the agency function of schools, which struggle to set and provide appropriate levels of technical competence and cultural demeanor for students who possess various degrees of preparation for collegiate instruction. To complicate matters, schools attempt to credential students for diverse jobs in rapidly changing labor market contexts. The exact competencies required in these occupations often are unknown to educators. Employers and the general public nevertheless hold expectations about college-based technical competency and organizational loyalty. Significant numbers of graduates fail to meet these expectations. Seldom are these contradictions

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conceived by dissatisfied parties as results of educational expansion and diversification. Where complaints of graduates' "shortcomings" become acute (as may happen when the mass media "exposes" government reports of supposed falling standards, grade inflation, irrelevant curricula, overspending, and the like), calls go out from numerous corners for higher educational reform, often couched in terms of a need for greater educational "uniformity'' and/or "accountability."10 Wider policing organizations (e.g., federal and state government departments of education, accreditation associations, and educational foun-

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dations) that certify colleges and universities ultimately are faced with similar agency issues regarding their accountability to principals in the work world and the media-informed public (including the cost-bearing parents of students). Efforts to identify irresponsibility often flow down from upper educational administrative bodies to less powerful organizational actors (often, teaching faculty) who are usually held accountable for educational "problems." These actors are then subject to the demands of higher educational leadership to effect improvements of student deficiencies with educational reforms.

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How much desired student outcomes are set and measured centrally by high-level administrators or determined locally by departments and faculty is significantly a consequence of the historical distribution of power in institutions and, more importantly, in sets of institutions. The organizational culture of schools, including a good deal of their similarity to other schools, is internally influenced by the distribution of power among administrators, faculty, and students; externally, this culture is shaped by susceptibility to allegations of malfeasance (e.g., from overseeing agencies, employers of graduates, and alumni). Educational organizations, or particular members, within especially risky markets (say, newer types of colleges, which recruit academically underprepared students and attempt to place them in emerging occupations, or faculty in academic disciplines that over time have lost prestige) are highly vulnerable to external scrutiny. Consequently, these schools and/or

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members have especially strong incentives for complicity with external mandates for standardized reform. States, Welfare Politics, and Credentialism

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While the influence of federal, state, and local government in the early forging of expansive credentialing was less important than one might expect (and indirect, i.e., through inaction, land/ transportation policies, and professional licensures), government surely has played a preponderant role in higher educational policy since World War II. Later government influence on higher education has included funding for new college founding, grants for various types of expansion in existing schools, student expense subsidies, research grants, and increasing licensures of occupations. During World War II, the federal government recruited significant numbers of university faculty for war-related administrative duties. In the postwar years, the government increasingly sponsored university research that benefited privileged private sector interests. Simultaneously, the government, through the GI Bill, provided

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higher educational benefits to returning veterans, many of whom were poorer, first-generation college students. The post-World War II growth of public universities, and the growth of a huge community college sector in the 1960s and 1970s, were both accomplished and sustained with extensive government involvement (Brint & Karabel, 1989). Private colleges also came to depend heavily on a host of government subsidies.

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My intention here is neither to bemoan nor extoll governmental influence on higher education. Rather, I consider what a full explanation of this change should take into account. The interplay between state and economy is mediated partly through higher educational policy. Specifically, chronic unemployment problems associated with the dynamics of late twentieth-century capitalist development have been dealt with in the U.S. partly through governmental policies that harbor people from labor force participation in prolonged educational credentialing sequences. Capitalist states attempt to juggle the demands of what O'Connor (1973) termed "monopolistic" and "competitive" sectors of economies in ways that preserve and expand the independent interests of government bureaucrats. In the United States, government educational policies are used, on the one hand, to subsidize profits and salaries for large corporations and professional groups (e.g., through profitable university

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research and professional licensures); on the other hand, separate policies uphold demandside economics and ameliorate political discontents within the poorer competitive sector. The latter side of the balance is wrought partly through educational welfare programs such as enrollment-boosting student loan and grant programs, tuition subsidies, workstudy payments, worker retraining programs, and maintenance of a staggering array of jobs in the public educational system itself. Both types of assistance are "welfare" expenditures, in the sense of being publicly funded economic supports. Thus, the most significant and overlooked aspect of the American welfare state involves provision of inexpensive, mass public higher education for underprivileged groups, and profitable research and occupational monopolies for powerful groups. The internal interests of educational actors certainly have encouraged educational welfare and credential expansion (related, yet

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analytically separable phenomena); labor market competition has also driven credential inflation. Still, it is difficult to imagine how such enormous levels of late twentieth-century educational inclusion and buttressing of privileged interests could have occurred in the absence of thoroughgoing state policy implementation. 11 A further question concerns why educational inclusion and maintenance of privileged interests in particular became major parts of the solution to economic dilemmas in the United States. Other nations relied more heavily on other means of social welfare (extensive hous-

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ing, food, and transportation assistance; greater tax relief for the poor; health care subsidies for the poor; mandatory, extended military service; privately-funded research institutes for economic "development"; wideranging occupational licensures through state-administered examinations). The answer to this question is too complex to fully resolve here, but the preceding analysis suggests several clues.

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Where several alternative means to an end work equally well, selection among means typically best is explained in functional terms, where prior historical circumstances and choices establish cognitive and pragmatic boundaries for later decision making. The early development of expansive higher education and credentialing was guided by different interests than the governmental policy-making interests that repeatedly have sought to simultaneously support the subsistence and buying power of poorer social strata and the monopolistic privileges of the dominant groups. However, later educational policy makers did not wrangle with the emerging economic difficulties empty-handed; rather, they utilized a specific "tool box" of existing structures and cultural predispositions in order to simplify their choices. U.S. welfare policy took a decided educational form because prior historical conjunctures had already created an institutional structure that had sufficient

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flexibility to incorporate new functions, and was widely perceived by advantaged and subordinate groups as a viable means of gaining and/or maintaining positional power. Decision-making complexity was greatly reduced. Twentieth-century governmental selection of education as a solution to economic administration problems followed a decision-making logic similar to earlier college-founding land speculators and organizational recruiters of college graduates who selected available educational resources to meet economic exigencies in land and labor markets, respectively. And, much as the educational institution produced partly by these early land speculators and recruiters, later governmentsponsored expansion of education became entrenched in a structural and cultural apparatus that was supported by alliances of interests and beliefs.

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Despite various criticisms of the system, contemporary American higher education is a remarkably stable structure. The market-driven, cyclical collapse and rebirth of credentialing systems, so characteristic of the universities of Western Europe and elsewhere, lacked significant social welfare appendages for common people. Historical credentialing systems were strictly organizations that created elite labor market monopolies (e.g., of the priesthood, law, and medicine). Legitimacy of such systems rested not on the politics of democratic access, but on the sanctity of exclusionary religious and secular traditions produced within universities and promulgated among disprivileged groups. Welfare policy

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is as institutionalized in U.S. higher education as are the certification of widespread professional and bureaucratic positions and the subsidization of capitalist profitability. Considering this circumstance, it is doubtful that U.S. credentialism will collapse of its own accord as have various historical systems. Isolated occupational credentialing failures, sitespecific enrollment reductions, and targeted research cutbacks are certain to continue, but these shifts will not alter the general character of the system.

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The closest analogue to modern credentialism, the Confucian educational examination system, was legitimized by an ideology of open access, rather than by the actual mass participation in unequal schools that defines the American system. Confucianism stressed an abstract culture of personal refinement, instead of an overt appeal to worldly interests. While U.S. higher education has long maintained a pretense to pragmatism, it clearly also is a stratifying, credentialing institution that obscures simple practicality with cryptic cultures as it creates monopolistic occupational enclaves. Ironically, the sheer volume of student traffic through American higher education keeps most people out of the very labor force monopolies the system creates. Higher education creates this condition by stratifying educational participation and marketability of degrees, and by extending the inurement period required for advantageous occupational placement. These elementary processes,

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assembled and set in motion by the early twentieth-century, should be at the foundation of all serious discussions of U.S. higher education and credentialism.

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Notes
Chapter 1 1. This is not to say that "58% of the 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in higher education." In fact, part of the reason for increasing higher educational enrollments in the late twentieth century concerns the growing number of "returning" and adult students, especially in community colleges. 2. For my purposes, the terms "credentialing," "occupational linkages," and similar terms all imply the use of educational or other criteria for hiring or promotion in occupations. The use here of the term "credentialism" is intended to imply extensive credentialing relationships in a given labor market.

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3. United States Bureau of Education (USBE; 18801930) figures on tuition income versus productive funds income (including endowments, sales of lands, benefactions, and state support) indicate that tuition and productive funds supplied close to equal amounts of income for most colleges in 1880. By 1900, incomes generally had increased, but tuitions supplied greater proportions of colleges' total income (ranging from 4:1 to 10:1 ratios). This increase was largely a consequence of increasing enrollments, rather than higher tuition costs (these increased only slightly in all but the most elite schools). By 1930, colleges had greatly increased their total incomes (foundation matching funds and permanent financial planning staff no doubt contributed to this), however elite schools derived far greater proportions of their income from productive funds.

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4. Andrews (1918) and Gates (1943) provide useful information on the disposal of lands granted to state universities through the Land-grant Act of 1862. Gates' analysis of Ezra Cornell's land use and sales practices in the Wisconsin pinelands demonstrates how timely usage and disposal decisions uplifted the financial status of Cornell University. The University of Illinois also made early fortuitous decisions that bolstered their operating funds. Evidence about the land sales of private colleges is scattered in individual college histories. Generally, private schools held much less land than their landgrant university counterparts, but I suspect the proportion of their wealth that was embedded in land holdings was similar to that of the state universities. 5. Burke's data are not wholly comparable to USBE data for the reasons cited above. We rely on Burke for data for the years prior to 1870.

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6. Comprehensive data regarding the ages of college students at specific historical intervals are not available. The 1821 age range is convenient to use, because the U.S. Census aggregated cases within this range.

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7. The United States was not the only nation to experience large growth in the proportion of eligible students enrolled in higher education, but by 1870 the United States had established a more inclusive higher educational institution than European countries and U.S. higher education managed to continue this pattern in the twentieth century. (A discussion of U.S./ European differences can be found in Chapter 4.) 8. Burke's data (Table 1.3) suggest that between 1860 and 1880, and then again between 1890 and 1900, normal school enrollments grew. It is probable that student enrollments were disproportinately female, especially in the latter period.

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9. I can only speculate on the reasons for increases in female enrollments in these decades. The 1890s was a period of general higher educational boom and a period in which a number of new "research" universities were founded. It is possible that these institutions were more open to women than traditional liberal arts colleges. The increasing number of females enrolled in the 1920s could be partly due to the role of the colleges in the women's movement of this decade. 10. These comments were directed to some members of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik in a 1913 paper by Weber. Chapter 2

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1. In fairness to Halsey, I should add that in the same article he argues that the transformation of higher education has been accompanied by a shift to greater competitiveness in the schools over the "achievement" of social status. Here, Halsey has in mind the difference between "sponsored" and "contest" mobility in the educational systems developed by Turner (1960). Nevertheless, it seems quite likely that Halsey has accepted at face value the basic "training" function of higher education. A more radical critique of the educational system would question the extent to which schools are primarily about providing job skills.

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2. See Braverman (1974) for an argument about the capitalist-inspired deskilling of occupations. I do not believe that in the sorts of professional and bureaucratic jobs college graduates of the early twentieth century had they underwent significant "deskilling," and certainly not in terms of technical "craft" skills. On the topic of occupational skills, see the discussion of Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) later in this chapter and also my treatment of the concept of "schooltaught" skill in the next chapter.

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3. Veysey (1965:12179) and Ben-David (1971:10868) provide discussions of the role of German university-based scientific research in providing a model for late nineteenth-century reforms in U.S. higher education. My point here is not to deny the obvious significance of university-based scientific research for economic development in the twentieth century. Rather, I challenge the notion that this innovation was solely or even primarily responsible for the solidified

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linkages between higher education and numerous occupations in the first few decades of the twentieth century. The research function of U.S. higher education grew enormously during and after World War II. Prior to this point, it is doubtful that employers' needs for bonafide scientific researchers was responsible for the huge enrollment expansions in colleges. 4. On the concept of social pollution and the relationship of cultural symbolism to social structural positions of insecurity, see Mary Douglas' (1966; 1970) reconstructions of Durkheim's sociology of religion. 5. Marx, I believe, saw technology as a force that, if appropriated by the proletariat, could enable sufficient production of material livelihood without much undesirable work being done by people.

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6. See, for example, Hollingshead's Elmtown's Youth (1949), a study of education and youth culture in Morris, Illinois during the early twentieth century. 7. The notion of the reproduction of social classes also is central to Bernstein's (197175) inquiries into the educational/linguistic foundations of class-based domination in Britain. Bernstein's work suffers from an utterly ahistorical, case-specific perspective that tells us little about how schools came to be as he claims they are and what differences pertain to various national contexts. Bernstein's focus has been on primary education and merely implies that the class "codes" learned there are carried forward to higher educational levels. It seems likely that a great deal of diversification of class (really occupational) cultures characterizes higher levels of educational systems.

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8. See Bourdieu (1979) for an interesting discussion of how the cultural superiority of dominant classes becomes effortless. On this same notion of legitimate domination as a transformation of power into a subjective feeling of "natural" superiority or inferiority (a quality of being), see Burger's (1985) excellent reconstruction of Weber's concept of social status. Burger suggests that a common classificatory opposition of cultural contents is that of "animality vs. humanity."

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9. The suggestion that Bowles and Gintis make is that the predominant control needs of the evolving capitalist economy necessitated the creation of new levels of education at three crucial junctures in the history of the economy. However, the authors simply do not treat enough empirical facts to allow judgement of the worth of their theory. They naively assume that all higher education prior to 1950 was elite education, even though most of the evidence suggests that U.S. higher education was thoroughly infiltrated by the middle class and even the poorer population early in the nineteenth century. We also get no explanation for why various levels of education persist once capitalism has decided they are outmoded. One would expect an historical analysis of a system to demonstrate why its parts remain together over time.

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10. Bowles and Gintis provide us only with vague notions of what sorts of changing needs emerged in the occupational structure (again, note the singularity of their interpretation of occupational stratification). 11. Many American sociologists also became familiar with the history of U.S. higher education through Jencks and Riesman's The Academic Revolution

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(1968). Some readers may wonder why this book receives no formal critique in this chapter. The reason is that I do not believe that Jencks and Riesman have elaborated an explanation of the rise of credentialism in their work. This may seem surprising, given the encyclopedic scope of their text, but not so surprising when we consider their stated objectives. The purpose of the book was to discuss "the relationship between higher education and American society" from a sociological and historical perspective; in doing this, "the book is primarily descriptive" (pp. xv, xvi). In actuality, the authors overstep this "descriptive" perspective countless times, but not in a manner sufficiently explicit or empirically substantiated to allow us to engage in a debate. An example of this tendency is the assertion that shows up twice in the book (pp. 9293, 200), that increasing enrollments of females were responsible for

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the expansion of liberal arts colleges. The claim is pertinent to my argument, but I get no supporting evidence from Jencks and Riesman. As I stated in the introduction, the available evidence (see Table 1.6) suggests only modest increases in the proportion of women in undergraduate education from 1890 to 1928. On the whole, I am unsatisfied with the historical evidence Jencks and Riesman cited in support of propositions relevant to our argument, even though I stand in general agreement with much of what the authors state "happened" in American higher education.

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12. Other work that explicitly acknowledges the contribution of Weber to the theory of educational change is that of Vaughan and Archer (1971), although I can find nothing peculiarly Weberian in the authors' usages of the concepts of "domination" and "assertion." Certainly Archer's later works (1979; 1982) are more closely allied to the "social reproduction" of mode of production classes, and this is not really what Collins or Weber discussed. Vaughan and Archer (1971) and Archer (1979; 1982) do not seriously address the question of educational conflict, change, and expansion in the United States.

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13. I should note that Collins was engaging in a sweeping comparative-historical comparison of declines of educational systems when he listed these dates. Nevertheless, the dates for the United States simply are off the mark, according to the available evidence. Collins provides no citation for his placement of U.S. crisis periods. 14. The U.S. Census Bureau (Table 1.1) reports a 35.3% growth of enrollments in the 1880s as opposed to the 22.9% in Burke's data. It is not clear why this discrepancy exists. Burke's rate of growth for the 1870s is also lower (93.4%) than that of the U.S. Census Bureau (123.1%).

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15. Collins (1979:3738) does argue that the business elite has always been highly educated (he does not attempt to explain why the business elite was becoming more and more college educated), but this does not tell us much about middle-level management, where a considerable proportion of college graduates were placed. 16. Collins elsewhere (1975:298347) provides a reconstruction of Etzioni's (1975) typology of organizational compliance strategies. 17. I think there are several other education/ occupation-related themes that are hard to ignore in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. history

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(e.g., the railroads, corporate growth, and one that too many analysts take lightlyland). 18. A common, but rather insignificant, form of ethnic "struggle" that emerged in the colleges after the curricular reforms of the 1880s involved the establishment of foreign language professorships in institutions where ethnics comprised a sizeable proportion of the student body. The successful efforts of Norwegians at the University of Wisconsin to secure such an appointment is a good example.

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19. It also is true that some fragmented ethnic groups founded colleges in order to promote ethnic solidarity (e.g., by creating an ethnic "heritage" where existing social ties were weak). The Swedes' Augustana College in Illinois was an example of this practice (Blank, 1984). On the general relationship between institution building and ethnic solidarity, see Breton (1964).

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20. One need only scan the faculty rosters of historical college catalogues for Germanic surnames to gain an appreciation for the representation of Germans in this occupation. It is likely that German-speaking peoples had a decided advantage in successful completion of study at the great German universities that dominated international graduate study up until the early twentieth century. A Ph.D. from a German university was an important qualification for teaching and research at a prestigious university in the United States prior to the development of American graduate schools (which significantly copied German models of instruction). See Storr (1953) on the origins of American graduate education.

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21. The exceptions to this, of course, are education-based exclusionary movements sponsored by groups whose jobs are being threatened by new immigrants. Demands for literacy tests are a very common example of this (Higham, 1963). However, there is little evidence that college degrees were mainly mechanisms for excluding threatening immigrants from various positions. 22. For other work within this school, see, for example, Vaughan and Archer (1971), Craig and Spear (1982a; 1982b), Spear (1982), Levy (1982), and Johansson (1982).

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23. I suspect that Archer feels she has taken a Weberian perspective in claiming that modern educational systems have become "Frankensteins." Weber viewed the bureaucratic organization of societal institutions as consisting of arrangements that were very difficult to change, partly due to their inadaptability and partly because of the "democratic" legitimacy beliefs that upheld bureaucratic authority. However, it would be an extremely naive reading of Weber to insinuate that he viewed bureaucratic organization as detached from or even opposed to all group interests. Just the oppositehe believed that bureaucratic authority tended to stabilize power structures.

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24. I believe persons who do not participate at higher levels of the educational system generally would favor (and in the past have favored) expansiveness as a means to greater educational access. Because, in most contexts, this group forms a majority, it would seem that even those excluded from education want expansive education.

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Chapter 3 1. I emphasize ''formal" culture because this differs from the "indigenous" cultures produced by all human groups. Formal-culture production entails greater expenditure of human resources, physical plant, supplies, and so on. I do not wish to say that materially impoverished groups fail to produce valuable culture (i.e., that they somehow are less "human" for their lack of formalculture production), because indigenous culture is, in many instances, just as complex in content as formal culture. For more on the distinctions between formal and informal culture, see Collins (1979:6062).

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2. This is not Archer's (1979) argument; in fact, her argument poses a quite different picture of higher educational expansion within centralized systems. Archer fails to show at exactly what levels of national educational systems expansion occurs and by what mechanisms changes are produced at each level. I would expect to find that higher educational expansion in Western Europe in the late twentieth century, where it is enduring, follows a pattern of decentralized higher educational authority, much like the United States. 3. The concept of "tradition" received its classical formulation in the work of Max Weber, especially in Economy and Society (1922). A more recent treatment of the subject, with special reference to educational traditions, is contained in Shils (1981:17984).

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4. The effects of U.S. economic panics and depressions on college enrollments appear to have been negligible, with the exception of the Panic of 1872, which was followed by a marked increase in enrollments. The economic crises of the early 1890s and the early 1930s were not accompanied by similar spurts of enrollment growth. As for college foundings, these were significantly curtailed in the aftermath of the Panic of 1836. 5. This is not to say that ideologically education is always a means to an end. Weber (1916) effectively drives this point home in his analysis of Confucian education. "Education for cultural enlightenment," in the Confucian context and elsewhere, stresses education as an end in itself (it is nonvocational), but this legitimating emphasis should not be confused with the objective credentialing function of degrees and examinations.

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6. I suspect that, with all else held constant, college graduates were more capable of productive and quality work in many settings than their nondegreeholding counterparts. Still, we must remember that college graduates typically entered more powerful positions that would, at least in principle, enable them to do less work and avoid quality-related issues. See Collins (1971:1005) for a discussion of the productivity of degree holders. 7. There is a large and growing sociological literature on agency relationships. See, for example, Barber (1983), Granovetter (1973; 1974), Heimer (1978; 1985), Lewis and Weigert (1985), Luhmann (1979), and Stinchcombe (1986a).

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8. On the notion of "ideal-type" concepts, see Weber (19031906; 1904, 1906, 191719). The typology that follows partly was drawn from discussions of professions contained in Abbott (1988), Collins (1975; 1979), Larson (1977), and Stinchcombe (1959; 1990). For the sake of economy in presenting the

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typology, I refer readers to these sources rather than list citations for individual contributions. 9. Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) and Bernstein (197175) are obvious exceptions to this tendency, although we would challenge them and other class-based theorists on different grounds (e.g., the reification of the concept of social class). 10. See Ricoeur (1976:145) on the differences between speech and writing as modes of discourse. 11. It is conceivable, given alternative historical circumstances where a different language group held sufficient power, that many language variants could have "worked" (i.e., could have been formalized) as the predominant mode of discourse in economic institutions.

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12. I might add here that the ballpoint pen was not yet invented, so even mastery of the technology of permanent writing instruments posed problems (blots). 13. Soltow and Stevens (1982:193201) argue that the asset of strength of the youthful working class economically compensated for their illiteracy, whereas the middle-aged were more profoundly damaged by illiteracy. 14. See Stinchcombe (1974:4563) for a discussion of the social structural significance of oral versus written communications and the implications of this distinction for "cosmopolitans" and "locals."

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15. The idea of the bureaucratic organization of work entails a separation of work activities from the activities of other groups (e.g., the household). There is nothing inconsistent with the concept of bureaucratic work in the thoroughgoing subordination of life in external groups to the demands of the workplace. Thus the separation of the work group from other groups might best be conceived as "noninterference" of such groups with the affairs of bureaucratic organizations. Where subordination of external interests is incomplete, the probability of workplace "interference" by such interests is increased by the reactionary grievances external communities may bring against employers.

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16. On the role of rituals in producing emotions of solidarity in organizations, see Collins (1975:36480; 1981b) and Meyer and Rowan (1977). Collins shows that social rituals form the microlevel foundation for macrosociological organizational stratification. Much of Collins' insight about this problem is drawn from the work of Goffman (1967) on face-to-face interactions in structurally unequal settings. The anthropological literature on the formal properties of ritual rites of passage, status elevation, and status reversal also is helpful in this context (Turner, 1969/1977, 1974; Van Gennep, 1909/ 1960). Although this study does not cover in detail the microsociological ritual and symbolic functions of collegiate pedagogy for occupations, I would argue that colleges did much in the way of accommodating the needs of particular organizations for individuals who were socialized to rituals and beliefs that promoted organizational loyalty. These practices, which

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include school-taught abilities to follow rules, to accept the stepwise progression of privileges in a collegiate career, and, most generally, to cooperate with one's fellows, inevitably would lie at the base of a study of this sort.

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17. Stinchcombe (1986a:265) rightly stresses that the organizational practice of hiring based on such knowledge often is quite rational, that is, not just a capitulation to irrationality. Chapter 4 1. Even given variations in the ages at which students enter universities in various nations, it is improbable that such gross differences in enrollments can be accounted for. Bear in mind that the period 18701930 was also one of the massive influx of poor, noncollegiate immigrants into the United States from various regions of Europe.

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2. Whitehead (1973:4749) offers examples in Georgia and Ohio. The usual form of state assistance to colleges was the land grant. This was true even in Colonial times, not just with the much-acclaimed establishment of state landgrant universities after the Civil War. 3. Many of the original western Catholic colleges were founded by French Canadian missionaries in older river towns. There is not much evidence that later Irish or German Catholics were heavily involved in starting colleges. Curiously, the German and Scandinavian Lutherans were not much the object of eastern condemnation, even though their efforts to establish colleges in the West were significant.

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4. Congregationalists founded Yale, Bowdoin, Harvard, Williams, Dart-mouth, and Middlebury. Presbyterians also were active outside New England, especially in the southern Atlantic states and the west. They founded Transylvania and Centre in Kentucky; Princeton in New Jersey; Union and Hamilton in New York; Dickinson, Washington and Jefferson, Allegheny, and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania; Tusculum and Tennessee in Tennessee; and Hampden-Sidney and Washington and Lee in Virginia. Episcopalians founded Washington and St. John's in Maryland; Columbia in New York, Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, Charleston in South Carolina, and William and Mary in Virginia (Tewksberry, 1932:21120). 5. Suspicions of land-speculative fraud in college founding are explicitly cited in SPCTEW guidelines.

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6. The great philanthropic organizations of the early twentieth century were the first to succeed in limiting the expansion of U.S. higher education (see Chapter 5). The U.S. Bureau of Education (1873) produced annual "surveys" of the state of higher education in the country, but had little effect on the growth of U.S. higher education in the nineteenth century. In format, the SPCTEW surveys of western colleges bear a remarkable resemblance to the early USBE surveys. 7. The SPCTEW strategy on endowing colleges with western lands came just after the proposal of the Dix Bill for land grants to aid the states in the establishment of insane asylums. The late 1850s also was the period when agitation for land grants to the states for the establishment of agricultural-industrial colleges ("land-grant universities") was gaining momentum (Andrews, 1918;

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Gates, 1943; Ross, 1942). For a detailed discussion of western college finance, see Johnson (1972,1974). 8. Lyman Beecher was one of the founders of the SPCTEW (Fraser, 1985: 15157). 9. Princeton's Nassau Hall was, for some time, the largest building in the colonies. Similarly, "Old Main" was the most imposing architectural structure in frontier college towns. 10. Holders of western land and other colonization-dependent concerns frequently sought to bring entire groups to particular locations. Newspaper advertisements, emigree guidebooks, and foreign-based agents created misleading images of western agricultural improvements and of fully developed frontier towns where, in fact, there might be swamp, desert, and no people, let alone towns.

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11. See Gates (1943:126) for a discussion of the economic determinants of regional variations in voting on the Agricultural College Acts. 12. Compare Doyle's (1978) discussions of the rivalry between Springfield and Jacksonville, Illinois and Calkins' (1937) comments on Knoxville and Galesburg, Illinois. 13. The Upper Mississippi Valley is not an anomaly. An examination of the early histories of almost any regional college founding in the nineteenth century will display the forces of land speculation, even though the exact type of economic interests in development varies by region. I first caught sight of this entire phenomenon in the work of Daniel Boorstin (1973:27380). Boorstin provides an interesting account of land speculative college founding in southern California during the 1880s.

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14. See Carlson (1951) on the bizarre history of land speculation, tenure, and agrarian unrest in the Illinois Military Tract. 15. Parker (1893) indicated only a few of the colleges that failed in Iowa. USBE (18731930) data indicate college closings in that state well in excess of Parker's examples. 16. The discussion of the Agricultural College Acts that follows is drawn from Gates' (1943) excellent treatment of the topic.

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17. The Agricultural College Acts specified enhancement of "agricultural and mechanical education" as their goal, but the establishment of separate colleges for this purpose was not mandated. State legislators were free to give the grants to existing colleges that would establish agricultural and mechanical programs. In many cases, these programs were marginal to liberal arts curricula or virtually absent. Agrarian and working-class interests in general became cognizant of this fact by the end of the nineteenth century and pressured a number of state legislatures to bolster vocational offerings or establish institutions separate from the original recipients of land grants. There was not much resistance from private colleges that had acquired and already benefited from federal land grants.

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18. Add Bloomington, Wheaton, Lincoln, Monmouth, Abingdon, Effingham, Eureka, Evanston, Greenville, Springfield, Carlinville, Lebanon, Quincy, Mount Morris, Galena, Kankakee, Naperville, Mendota, and many others to the list of

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Illinois towns that early established colleges and numerous other cultural institutions. Similar lists can be compiled for many states, especially in the North.

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19. The role of land speculation in promoting an institutional base for late nineteenth-century enrollment expansion in the United States was most prominent in the northern states and on the West Coast (the regions where much enrollment expansion occurred). I have not tried to analyze variations in the types of schools founded at various stages of land-speculative fervor, but I suspect that such an inquiry would turn up significant regional differences in liberal arts, state university, junior college, and other models of higher education, depending on the period in which given regions developed. See Stinchcombe (1965) for a discussion of the relationship between periods of organizational founding and the structure of organizations. I should also note that the absence of higher educational institutions in contemporary regions may be partly explained by the lack of vested college-founding interests at crucial historical junctures. A good example of this phenomenon is the Grand

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Prairie region of Illinois. As Bogue (1959) has shown, this area consisted mainly of swamplands in the period of intense college founding in Illinois. Speculative values were very long term, as development of the prairie swamps depended on costly drainage technologies (Socolofsky, 1979). College founding was not used as an inducement to investment in this area, nor did the area have a single college by 1930. 20. The number of theological students doubled between 1860 and 1870. This was the largest increase in such students since the 1820s. Increases in theological enrollments fell steadily for the rest of the century. 21. The percentage of the 1821 age group that enrolled in higher education made its smallest increase in this decade (from 2.72% in 1880 to 3.04% in 1890). See Table 1.1

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22. One need only consider the influence of local economic and political interests in the founding of junior or community colleges, both in the early twentieth century and in the present. See Brint and Karabel (1989) for the definitive history of the community college movement and the significance of local interests in founding such colleges. Chapter 5 1. The exception to this trend was the interruption of the Civil War years, which briefly took students away from some colleges for war-related services. 2. See also Table 1.2, which shows U.S. Bureau of Education figures for collegiate/technical school, law school, medical school, and theological school enrollments from 1872 to 1899.

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3. Atherton (1954) provides perhaps the best introduction to nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury small town business life and ideology. See also Veblen (1923:119204) and Doyle (1978) on the same topic. The 1870s was a period when midwestern Grange associations began increasing their member-

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ships and supporting or creating local enterprises (for example, grain elevators, supply stores, implement stores, etc.) (Nordin, 1974). 4. The picture was likely more bleak than U.S. Bureau of Education figures indicate. Many weak schools, which undoubtedly suffered enrollment decreases in the 1880s, were not included in USBE surveys. A comparison of my own findings of existing institutions with institutions listed for various years by the USBE suggests gross underestimates of weak colleges by the USBE. 5. Blackburn, Chicago (the older institution), St. Viateur's, Eureka, Illinois College, McKendree, Lincoln, Monmouth, Northwestern College (not "University"), Shurtleff, Westfield, Wheaton, and Abingdon all experienced declines.

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6. The discussion that follows draws on Rudolph's (1962:19093) treatment of perpetual scholarships. Rudolph (1962:191) provides substantial citations to college histories that document the perpetual scholarship phenomenon. See also Salganik (1981) on the same topic. 7. Smallwood's (1935) study of early records at Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Mount Holyoke, and Michigan indicates a similar "personalism" in the evaluation of student performances after they were admitted to colleges. Apparently, personalized examinations of enrolled students gave way to impersonal grading in the 1870s and 1880s, prior to the depersonalization of entrance examinations.

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8. College administrators, trustees, and nonteaching college presidents likely most favored lax student admissions decisions. College faculty frequently expressed their dismay about the "underpreparedness" of students and, therefore, probably argued most strongly against admission of heterogenous students. 9. The discussion of the Michigan experiment that follows is taken from Wechsler's (1977) account of events at that school.

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10. The success of the University of Michigan in increasing its enrollments from 1870 to 1890 was not a simple function of being a state university. Evidence of this is contained in the enrollment problems of other state universities in various decades: Kentucky's enrollments dropped from 173 to 66 between 1872 and 1880; West Virginia's fell from 71 in 1872, to 62 in 1880, to 59 in 1890; Illinois had 388 enrollments in 1872 and 259 in 1880; Missouri's enrollments dropped from 555 in 1880 to 504 in 1890; Indiana's fell from 211 in 1872 to 183 in 1880, and so on. It is likely that the state universities that experienced great enrollment increases over the course of given decades implemented recruitment plans similar to those in practice at Michigan in the 1870s. Minnesota, for example, under president Folwell, recruited from high schools in the 1880s and thereby increased their enrollments from 159 in 1880 to 1,009 in 1890. Illinois reversed their enrollment

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decline of the 1870s with the addition of a certificate system in the 1880s. Illinois' enrollments grew from 259 in 1880 to 352 in 1890 (U.S. Bureau of Education, 1873; 1880; 1890). 11. In some cases, the certification system was adopted in emulation of the practices of competitor institutions. This likely was the case with the University of Illinois in its relationship to the University of Michigan. Illinois imple-

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mented a certificate system in 1876. The list of accredited high schools for Illinois grew as rapidly as the list at Michigan. There were 30 high schools on Illinois' accredited list in 1883 and 113 on the list in 1893. See Wechsler's (1977: 5053) discussion of the case of the University of Illinois. 12. The accreditation associations were dominated by prominent college men, even though high school representatives were incorporated as members of governing boards. Most of the work of the accreditation associations appears to have favored the interests of the colleges rather than the high schools. Because college domination was so evident, we place "mediators" in quotes.

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13. In 1918, the National Education Association (NEA) Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education put forth a report that elaborated the "Seven Cardinal Principles" of high school pedagogy, which would promote health, command of fundamental processes, worthy home membership, vocation, citizenship, worthy use of leisure time, and ethical character (Lagemann, 1983:98). These goals make no reference to the college preparatory function that, presumably, was by 1920 getting done without much agitation from the colleges. An assistant superintendent of Minneapolis schools complained at the NEA meetings in 1920 that high schools "were saturated with college requirement rules and standards" that he would like to see supplemented with vocational courses, social activities, and community involvement (Wesley, 1957:64).

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14. In a letter written by Eliot to president Seth Low of Columbia (Nicholas Butler's predecessor and compatriot in certification movements) shortly after the issuance of the report, Eliot assured Low that "as you may have read between the lines of the Report of the Committee of Ten, I am very much interested in promoting a great widening of the requirements for admission to our colleges. I want to see substantial requirements arranged in History, Chemistry and Physics, and Natural History; so that the colleges can safely accept these subjects for admission on a level with the traditional subjects. I believe this change would greatly improve the public secondary schools, and greatly broaden the foundations of our colleges in the schools below them" (Wechsler, 1977:8485). The subordinate position of the high schools was plain to Eliot. It is doubtful that many high school teachers unaffiliated with college certification mechanisms

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would have seen much concession in the curricula Eliot mentions here. 15. Another group that represented college curricular interests is the so-called "Committee of Seven." This group of eminent college historians represented the interests of the American Historical Association, accreditation associations, and the college in general in raising to four the number of years high school students who hoped to attend college would need to study history (Wesley, 1957:7172). 16. Financial receipts of the NCA came almost entirely from cheap membership fees ($3 in the 1890s) paid by accredited institutions and by individual supporters. In 1900, total receipts for the organization were less than $500, almost all of which was used for operating expenses. By 1920, receipts were only about $7,000 and the balance of working funds at year's end only had accumulated to about $2,500 (Davis, 1945:245).

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17. The superintendent of Chicago public schools in the late 1890s was A.F. Nightingale, an officer in the NEA and the originator of the report of the Committee of Seven. 18. Bureaucratization of urban school systems in the mid-nineteenth century is covered in Katz (1968; 1971). In addition to early reforms, Ravitch (1974) treats reforms in New York City, which were led by Nicholas M. Butler in the 1890s and 1900s. Counts (1928) offers a critique of turn-of-the-century school reform in Chicago. The best discussion of this topic on a national basis is contained in Tyack (1974).

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19. As Herbst (1989) indicates, normal school graduates often had short tenures as teachers before moving on to other occupations. The alumni records of Illinois State Normal University (1917), a prestigious normal school, suggest that many graduates (particularly of the liberal arts department) never entered teaching, perhaps because they and their employers saw the institution as equivalent to other colleges.

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20. Barrow (1990:61) appears to dismiss the college presidents on foundation boards of trustees as mere figureheads coopted by the capitalist for their own purposes. This is an exaggeration. True, men such as Butler, Eliot, Pritchett, and others had ties to major financial groups (Sinclair, 1922), but we should not discount the fact that many college presidents, faculty, secondary school officials, students, and other actors only remotely tied to the "capitalist state" not only supported, but also helped implement the decrees of the major foundations as they applied to higher education. It would be shortsighted to dismiss their disparate interests in foundation policies as "capitalistic" or, alternatively, as simple "false consciousness." By the same token, realize that the nonacademic interests of the directorate of the foundations were masked quite well under academic rubric. Chapter 6

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1. In 1910, the census began to include much more detailed information regarding specific occupational titles. 2. Burritt (1912:72) argues that a similar decline occurred after the Panic of 1837, but the data are not as convincing here, as there was a slight increase in business graduates. Declines in business occupations in periods where there were no depressions are not explained by Burritt. 3. I suspect that business and engineering graduates were more difficult to track down than professionals, who tend to know one another better and whose biographies are sometimes available in publications of professional societies.

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4. Burritt's data suffers from insufficient criteria for selecting the primary occupation of graduates. Burke has avoided this problem, but still we are faced with difficulties in assessing how much college degrees contributed to job placements. It is reasonable to suppose that the effect of credentials decreases with each career move, as acquaintances and skills learned on the job gain in importance.

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5. One might, for example, attempt to organize a school that teaches individuals how to divine water wells with willow branches, but it might be difficult to compete with modern seismographic technicians who are doing the same task and who have gained from the buying public widespread legitimacy as efficacious practitioners. 6. Self-learners and apprentices frequently have competed with school-taught practitioners as, for example, in the basic business skills of bookkeeping or stenography. 7. Unskilled union labor groups are a common example of workers who dominate labor markets without controlling the nature of their work or training for practice.

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8. If a company largely trains its own technicians in complex industrial plants, it is not likely that either workers or educational institutions will attempt to duplicate such training due to the costs involved and the existence of alternative training. Such situations generally give rise to school-taught monopolies of abstract knowledge that is purportedly required to begin on-the-job training. 9. I say "bureaucratic professionals" because, in the special sense of formally educated labor market domination under consideration here, such workers are much different from lowerlevel participants in their organizations, although they are not as thoroughly in control of their work as are other workers.

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10. I realize this discussion does not explain why a graduate of tiny, unknown Eureka College in Illinois would become the president of the United States. Electoral politics differs from organizational recruitment concerning the basis of public trust of delegated authority.

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11. Edward Janes James, for example, was Professor of Public Finance and Administration at Wharton during the 1890s. James was the leading disciple of Philadelphia banker William Rhawn, who persuaded the American Bankers Association to pressure colleges for more business education. James left Wharton for the presidency of Northwestern University, where he immediately sought to implement a commerce school based on the Wharton model. Various factions at Northwestern opposed the idea during James' presidency so, frustrated, he went on to the presidency of the University of Illinois, where he succeeded in founding a reputable business school (Kirkland, 1956:9899; Sedlak & Williamson, 1983). Chapter 7

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1. Perhaps the most important locus of landspeculative college-founding interests in the latter half of the twentieth century was within community colleges. These institutions are organized in varying ways from state to state (e.g., as "district" colleges funded by taxes from within districts, or as institutions centrally funded by individual states). Community colleges sometimes have been objects of intense local and state political conflicts, including battles over the initial location of institutions in one city or another, or on one parcel

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of land or another. Needless to say, it has been in this context that land-speculative interests have come into play. 2. An introduction to this profusion of cultural analysis may be found in the articles and references contained in Alexander (1988), Crane (1994), Griswold (1994), Hunt (1989), Lamont and Fournier (1992), Mukerji and Schudson (1991) and Munch and Smelser (1992).

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3. And, in the United States, it indeed was ascetic Protestant sects who early on carried the vocational (ministerial training) and expansive (missionary college founding) "spirit" of higher educational expansion forward. Recall my treatment of this topic in Chapter 4. I believe it would be worthwhile to pursue a "Protestant Ethic" thesis concerning the launching of U.S. credentialism (in the manner of Merton's [1938] study of the early organization of scientific research in Britain); however, the rational, vocational character of U.S. higher educational credentialism was augmented by specific political and economic forces both at its inception and in later years.

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4. It is an empirical problem to determine how much public ideologies shape educational culture or the reverse, or to what extent external forces (e.g., the state, which will be discussed later in this chapter) have shaped both public belief and educational content.

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5. Consider the issue of "multiculturalism" in higher education, beginning in the 1980s, within the context of the emergence of the AfricanAmerican middle class and middle-class females in general as forces in educational reform. The absence of an influential, inclusive workingclass component to these debates is a consequence of weak consciousness and organization of large segments of this population as regards higher educational issues. Higham's (1963; 1993) classic work on U.S. nativism and his later treatment of the absence of class in current multiculturalism controversies offer incisive discussions of the politics of race vs. class in U.S. government and higher education.

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6. This spread of cultural conflict should not be conceptualized in naive psychologistic "emulation" terms, because such "copying" normally takes place only in contexts where structural alignments facilitate the social psychology of emulation. 7. The first of these critics were leaders of religious college-founding societies. Later, educators within accreditation associations, foundations, and the U.S. Department of Education were the most vocal. Misgivings about the duplication of educational provision was not limited to conservative organizations, as even radical critics such as Sinclair (1922) and Veblen (1918) spoke of the problem.

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8. It is interesting to note the historical change in college names from "junior" to "community" college. Contemporary community college members widely consider the use of "junior" college pejorative, due to the implication that their institutions are subordinate to 4-year institutions. 9. The idea of organizational structure and culture as a function of the historical period of organization founding is explored in Stinchcombe (1965). Stinchcombe (n.d.) also addresses the broad issue of formalism in organizations as a consequence of efforts to guard substantive areas of discretion. The

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discussion that follows carries insights from these sources to the specific case of higher educational competition and rationalization.

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10. A concrete example of this demand for accountability, commonly termed the ''assessment" movement, currently is underway in the U.S. educational system, including colleges and universities. The origins of this particular wave of suspicion date back to the mid-1980s, when the highly influential government report, A Nation at Risk, noted falling student competence and sparked educational administrators to launch reform movements aimed at improving student "outcomes." Similar accountability initiatives were sweeping the business world (e.g., "total quality management" or "TQM"). Ten years later, under the guidance of younger educational administrators trained in the new pedagogy and older administrators compelled to adopt popular innovations, assessment plans are mandated by regional accreditation associations for all member institutions (essentially, all institutions) and assessment notables make profitable lecture circuits. At least one institution (Alverno College

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in suburban Milwaukee) has made a veritable cottage industry of assessment reform, by structuring all college activity around "outcomes," sending faculty to other institutions to deliver lectures, and bringing outside educators in house for lengthy on-site institutes. It is curious to note the relative absence in outcomes assessment literature of the other side of the black box, namely, the changing nature of incoming students. This changing input demography is a result of educational expansion.

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11. Although the question of how deliberately governmental policy makers approached educational reforms with large-scale economic problems in mind remains open. This issue is well worth exploring. It is probable that deliberations over inclusion of educational benefits in the post-World War II GI Bill hold clues about the extent of conscious legislative decision making of the sorts Keynesian economic theory would suggest. The second major series of decisions likely would center on the expansion of the community college sector in the 1960s and 1970s, which also was informed by the problem of military personnel returning to labor markets (and, of course, by the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s).

Page 191

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Page 213

Index
A Abbott, Andrew, 145, 165, 180-181 n. 8 Academies, 5, 39, 40, 75, 112, 118 Accreditation college, 8, 27, 37, 79, 122, 123-125, 126, 130-132, 168 high school, 5-6, 117, 118-120, 121-124, 125 Admissions process, 117-118, 121 Agency relationships, 55-59, 169 Agricultural administration, 9, 142

963/1024

Agricultural College Acts, 87, 95-98 Alexander, Jeffrey, 189 n. 2 Allmendinger, David F., 85, 142 American Association of Junior Colleges, 127 American Education Society (AES), 83, 85 American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), 83 American Revolution, 77 Andrews, Benjamin F., 96, 98, 175 n. 4, 182-183 n. 7 Angell, James, 118, 120, 123 Anglo domination, 40-43 Anti-Catholicism, 81-82

964/1024

Apple, Michael W., 31 Apprenticeships, xvii-xviii, 73 Archer, Margaret S., 21, 23, 43-46, 51, 52, 82, 178 n. 12, 179 n. 22, 180 n. 2 Atherton, Lewis, 184-185 n. 3 Atkins, Gaius G., 83 Augsburg College, 93 Augustana College, 92-93, 109 Authority. See also Bureaucracies; Bureaucratic positions; Organizational structure agency relationships vs., 56 challenges to, 71

965/1024

delegation of, 149-151, 155 hierarchies of, 60, 62 B Backlash movements, 163 Baldwin, Theron, 85 Barber, Bernard, 180 n. 7 Barrow, Clyde W., 8, 31, 79, 126, 187 n. 20 Becker, Gary S., 29 Beecher, Lyman, 81, 85, 183 n. 8 Bell, Daniel, 24-25, 27 Ben-David, Joseph, 28, 53, 176-177 n. 3 Bendix, Reinhard, 9, 158

966/1024

Bergendoff, Conrad, 93 Bernstein, Basil, 31, 61, 177 n. 7, 181 n. 9 Blank, Dag, 179 n. 19 Bogue, Allan G., 86 Bogue, Margaret B., 87, 184 n. 19 Bonacich, Edna, 42 Boorstin, Daniel J., 99, 183 n. 13 Boosterism, xi, 3-4, 112 Bossard, James, 152, 153, 156 Bourdieu, Pierre, 31, 33, 34, 176 n. 2, 177 n. 8, 181 n. 9 Bowles, Samuel, 31, 35-36, 177 n. 9-10 Braverman, Harry, 35, 176 n. 2

967/1024

Bremner, Robert H., 8 Breton, Raymond, 179 n. 19 Brint, Steven, 127, 130, 171, 184 n. 22 Brown, David K., 19 Brown University, 97-98 Bureaucracies. See also Organizational control college graduates in, 55 communication in, 61, 149-150 and corporate social structure, xiii, 7-8 degree-based recruitment into, 69, 145-147 growth of, xiii hierarchies of authority in, 60, 62

968/1024

managerial employees in, xiii, 7, 38, 135, 147-156 Bureaucratic positions, professional positions vs., 49-50, 55, 57-59, 143-147 Burger, Thomas, 177 n. 8 Burke, Colin B., 11, 14, 15, 37, 83, 101, 102, 105, 140, 141-142, 175 n. 5, 176 n. 8, 178 n. 14, 187 n. 4 Burritt, Bailey, 11, 137-140, 187 n. 2, 187 n. 4

Page 214

Business education, 7-8, 73, 77-78, 127, 151-152, 154-156 Butler, Nicholas M., 120, 121, 126, 186 n. 14, 187 n. 18 Buttrick, Wallace, 126 C Calhoun, Daniel H., 53, 142 Calkins, Earnest E., 90, 183 n. 12 Calvert, Monte A., 53 Capitalism schooling and, 35-36 Weberian analysis of, 37 Carlson, Theodore L., 88, 90, 183 n. 14

970/1024

Carnegie, Andrew, 126 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), 8, 32, 79, 120, 122, 126-130 Carnoy, Martin, 31 Carstensen, Vernon R., 87 Catholic religious culture, 41, 81-82, 115 Caullery, M., 28 Centralization, 104, 149 Certification, 54, 65, 118-120, 121-123 Chandler, Alfred D., 148, 149-150, 157 Civil service, 156-159 patronage and, 9, 156 recruitment policies, 157

971/1024

reforms in, 9, 156-159 Civil Service Commission, 157 Civil War, 96, 101, 137, 154 Clark, Burton R., 24 Class. See Social class Coercive control, 66-67, 70 College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB), 123 College founding, 3-4, 88-100, 134 case studies of, 90-100 described, 88-90 Colleges, 39.

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See also Liberal arts colleges; specific colleges accreditation of, 8, 27, 37, 79, 122, 123-125, 126, 130-132, 168 administration of, 7-8, 113, 116-132 admissions process, 117-118, 121 as agencies for production of agents, 54-59, 169 business schools, 7-8, 73, 77-78, 151-152, 155-156 colonial, 77-78 enrollment in. See Enrollments financial concerns of, 4-5, 8, 77, 89-90, 109-111

973/1024

foundations' influence on, 8, 27, 32, 79, 126-129, 130, 163, 168 government influence on, 78-79, 163-164, 170-173 growth in number of, xi, xii, 3-4, 10-11, 12, 15, 37-38, 48, 73-103, 110-111 high schools as alternatives to, 111-113 impersonality of, 159-160 job skills taught by, 26-27, 113-114, 143-144 junior, 3, 114, 127, 130, 131, 163, 168 land-grant, 4, 26, 77, 87, 106, 107-109, 110, 111 occupational distribution of graduates, 136-142

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as producers of new technologies, 27-28 religion and, 79-85 state influence on, 77 universities vs., 129-130 Collins, Randall, x-xi, 36-43, 45, 61, 74-75, 143, 178 n. 13, 178 n. 15, 178 n. 16, 180 n. 1, 180 n. 6, 180-181 n. 8, 181 n. 16 Colonial colleges, 77-78 Columbia University, 120, 123 Committee of Ten Report, 120-121, 122, 123-124, 155 Common schools, 35, 39, 40, 62, 75, 87, 113, 125 Communication skills, 61, 149-150

975/1024

language skills, 24, 25-26, 50, 59, 60-62, 63 oral, 63, 152 written, 61, 152 Community building, 69 Community colleges. See Junior colleges Conflict theory. See Multi-ethnic conflict theory Confucian educational system, 173 Congregationalists, 81, 82-85, 94 Constitutional Convention, 78 Consultants, 65 Control educational, xi, 48-49, 51-53, 74-79, 113-115

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organizational, 50, 66-72, 73, 74 Control uncertainty, 59 Cook, John W., 85 Cooke, Jay, 101, 105 Cooperation, 62 Cornell, Ezra, 95 Cornell College (University), 95, 114 Counts, George S., 187 n. 18 Craig, John E., 179 n. 22 Crane, Diana, 189 n. 2 Credential inflation, xv, 158-159 Credentialism, x-xvi, 160 attraction of students and, xi-xiv

977/1024

broad institutional base for, xi, xii, 3-4 central factors in, xi-xiv, xvii, 3-10, 48-72 culture of, 164-167 defined, xvii educational competition and, 4-6, 167-170

Page 215

educational control and, xi, 48-49, 51-53, 74-79, 113-115 government role in, 170-173 and growth in number of educational institutions, xi, xii, 3-4, 10-11, 12, 15, 37-38, 48, 73-103 and labor market recruitment, xi, xii-xiv, 2, 7-9, 49, 50, 63-72, 136-162, 163 methodology for studying, 18-21 and monopoly over credentials, xii, 6-7, 38-39, 73, 74 problems of, xiv-xvi theories of, x, xvi, 23-72 and wealth, xi, 6-7, 48, 51, 53, 82, 83

979/1024

in widespread occupations, 2 Credential Society, The (Collins), 36-43 Cultural capital, x, 45, 53-54 Cultural currency, x, 45 Cultural markets, 38-39 Culture production, 38-39, 53-54 Curricular reforms, 5, 26, 113-116 D Darknell, Frank A., 8 Davis, Calvin O., 123, 125, 186 n. 16 Davis, David, 93 Delegation of authority, 149-151, 155

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Demographic trends, 10-18 college attendance, ix college enrollment, xii-xiv, 1, 4-6, 10-16, 37-38, 48-49, 52, 75, 76, 104-116, 163 female enrollment, 17-18, 19, 105 growth in number of institutions, xi, xii, 3-4, 10-11, 12, 15, 37-38, 48, 73-103, 110-111 occupational distribution of liberal arts graduates, 136-142 population, 16 Denison University, 111 Depauw University, 111 Dewhurst, J. Frederic, 152, 153, 156 DiPrete, Thomas A., 9, 157, 158

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Douglas, Mary, 177 n. 4 Doyle, Don H., 85, 99, 183 n. 12, 184-185 n. 3 Drexel Institute, 154, 155 Durkheim, Emile, 71 E Economy and Society (Weber), xx Educational attainment, xvi Educational control, xi, 48-49, 51-53 curricular reform and, 113-115 lack of, 74-79 Edwards, Alba M., 135 Elective system, 114-115

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Eliot, Charles, 79, 116, 120, 126, 186 n. 14 Emigrating companies, 85 Employee control, 50 Engineering, 19, 109, 137 Enrollments expansion of, xiii-xiv, 1, 4-6, 10-16, 37-38, 48-49, 52, 75, 76, 104-106, 163 and increase in recruitment base, 116-120 nineteenth-century, 4-6, 104-116, 119 professional school, 13, 14, 17-18, 75, 109 Episcopalians, 82-83 Ethnicity. See also Immigrant groups

983/1024

Anglo domination and, 40-43 colleges based on, 92-93 multi-ethnic conflict theory, 36-43 Etzioni, Amitai, 38, 64, 66-67, 68, 70, 178 n. 16 European model of higher education, 74-79, 115-116, 118 Evangelism, 85 Evans, John, 91-92 Evjen, Henry, 92 Examinations civil service, 9, 157-158 college admissions, 122, 123, 126, 127 Extracurricular activities, 115-116

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F Fagley, Frederick L., 83 Feeder institutions, xii, 5 Fell, Jesse, 93 Flexner Report, 8 Formal culture, 51 Foundations, influence over colleges, 8, 27, 32, 79, 126-129, 130, 163, 168 Fournier, Marcel, 189 n. 2 Frank, Charles E., 85, 97 Franks, Robert, 126 Fraser, James W., 81, 85, 183 n. 8 Free-rider problem, 71

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Frieze, Henry, 118-119 Functionalist theory, x, 24-29, 59 G Gale, George W., 90-91 Gates, Frederick, 126 Gates, Paul W., 86, 87, 88, 97, 98-99, 175 n. 4, 182-183 n. 7, 183 n. 11, 183 n. 16 General Education Board (GEB), 122, 123, 126-127 GI Bill, 170-171 Gintis, Herbert, 31, 35-36, 177 n. 9-10 Goffman, Erving, 181 n. 16 Goodrich, Carter, 87

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Goodrich, Grant, 91 Goodspeed, Thomas W., 130 Goodykoontz, Colin B., 83, 142 Governmental control, 8-9 Graduate education, 3, 79. See also Professional education enrollment trends, 13, 14, 17-18 undergraduate degrees as prerequisite for, 1-2 women in, 19

Page 216

Graff, Harvey J., 62 Granovetter, Mark, 160, 180 n. 7 Great Depression, 158 Great Transformation, 1 Greeley, Horace, 94 Grinnell, Josiah, 91, 93-94 Grinnell College, 93-94 Griswold, Wendy, 189 n. 2 H Hadley, Arthur, 126 Halsey, A. H., 24 Harper, William R., 123, 126

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Harris, William, 120 Harvard University, 114, 116, 120 Hechter, Michael, 20 Heimer, Carol A., 180 n. 7 Herbst, Jurgen, 77, 125, 168, 187 n. 19 Higham, John, 179 n. 21, 189 n. 5 High schools, xii, 62, 73-74, 75 accreditation of, 5-6, 117, 118-120, 121-124, 125 capitalism and, 35-36 as college alternative, 111-113 college control over administration of, 116-132

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college courses offered by, 129-130 ethnic minorities and, 43 preparatory role of, 119-120 professionalization of teaching and administration, 124-125, 127 public, growth of, 40, 111-113, 117 teachers in, 125 Hofstadter, Richard, 79 Holbrook, Stewart H., 94 Holingshead, A. B., 177 n. 6 Homestead Act (1862), 87, 96 Hoogenboom, Ari, 9 Howe, Barbara, 8

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Hoyt, John W., 78-79 Human capital theory, xiii, 29-31, 59 Hunt, Lynn, 189 n. 2 Hutchins, Robert, 130 I Illinois College, 99 Illinois State Normal College, 168 Illinois Wesleyan College, 93 Illinois Wesleyan University, 109 Immigrant groups. See also Ethnicity ethnic colleges of, 92-93

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land grants to, 87-88 multi-ethnic conflict theory and, 36-43 religious culture and, 82, 85 Industrialization, 26 functionalist theory and, 24-25 job skills needed in, 27 Industrial Revolution, 27 Inefficiency, xiv-xv International Congress of Education, 155 Iowa Band, 85, 93-94 Iowa College, 93-94 J

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Jacksonian era, 4, 6, 105 James, Edward Janes, 188 n. 11 Jefferson, Thomas, 78 Jencks, Christopher, 17, 165, 177-178 n. 11 Job skills, 73 colleges in teaching of, 26-27, 50, 59-63, 113-114, 143-144 formally learned, 50, 59-63, 143-144 functional theory and, 27-28 human capital theory and, 29-31 language skills as, 24, 25-26, 50, 59, 60-62, 63 social reproduction theory and, 31-33

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technological innovation and, 25-26 Johansson, Lena, 33, 179 n. 22 Johnson, Daniel T., 83, 110, 182-183 n. 7 Johnson, Hildegard B., 88 Jordan, David S., 126 Joslyn, C. S., 150, 151 Junior colleges, 3, 114, 127, 130, 131, 163, 168 K Kanter, Rosabeth M., 63 Karabel, Jerome, 127, 130, 171, 184 n. 22 Katz, Fred E., 187 n. 18 Katz, Michael, 62, 112

994/1024

Kelsey, Harry E., 91, 92 Kirkland, Edward C., 154, 155, 188 n. 11 Kiser, Edgar, 20 Knowledge revolution, 114 Knox College, 90-91, 99, 109 Kocka, Jurgen, 148 L Labaree, David F., ix-xvi, 41, 43, 113, 168 Labor market, 134-162. See also Job skills Anglo domination of, 40-43 changes in composition of, 135-136

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civil service, 9, 156-159 ethnic makeup of, 39-43 occupational distribution of graduates in, 136-142 recruitment into, xi, xii-xiv, 2, 7-9, 49, 50, 54-59, 63-72, 136-162, 163 standardization and, 53 uncertainty of, 50, 55-57, 63-72 Lafayette College, 111 Lagemann, Ellen C., 8, 123, 126, 186 n. 13 Lamont, Michele, 189 n. 2 Land-grant colleges and universities, 4, 26, 77, 87, 106, 107-109, 110, 111

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Land speculation, xi, 3-4, 83-85, 86-100, 110-111, 163 and federal land policy, 86-88

Page 217

railroads and, 84, 87, 90-91, 92-93, 98, 101, 105, 149, 153 town founding and, 88-90 Language skills, 24, 25-26, 50, 59, 60-62, 63 Larson, Magali S., 79, 180-181 n. 8 Lawrence, Amos, 94-95 Lawrence College, 94-95 Law schools, 13, 14, 109, 142 Leander Clark College, 94 Levin, Henry M., 31 Levy, Daniel, 179 n. 22 Lewis, J. David, 180 n. 7 Liberal arts colleges, x

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enrollment trends, 11-16, 105, 106-107, 109 foundings and closings, 15 occupational distribution of graduates of, 136-142 years of schooling and, 27 Licensing examinations, xvii-xviii Licht, Walter, 149 Lincoln, Abraham, 92, 93 Lombard University, 109 Love, Horace T., 98 Low, Seth, 121, 186 n. 14 Loyalty, 7, 144, 147 Luhmann, Niklas, 180 n. 7

999/1024

Lunt, Orrington, 91 Lutherans, 85 Luther College, 106 M Madsen, David, 78 Managerial employees, xiii, 7, 38, 135, 147-156 Marrou, H. I., 74 Marshall, Helen E., 93 McGrane, Reginald C., 100 Medical schools, 13, 14, 105, 106, 109, 142 Meridith, Robert, 81 Merton, Robert, 62, 189 n. 3

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Methodists, 85 Metzger, Walter P., 79 Meyer, John W., 181 n. 16 Military Bounty Act (1812), 88, 90-91 Miller, Howard, 83 Missionary societies, 79, 82-85 Mitchell, B. R., 76 Morrill Act, 95, 97, 99 Mukerji, Chandra, 189 n. 2 Multi-ethnic conflict theory, 36-43 Munch, Richard, 189 n. 2 N

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National Council on Education, 120 National Education Association (NEA), 120-121, 123-124, 155 National Teachers Association, 78-79 Newcomer, Mabel, 153 Nightingale, A. F., 124, 187 n. 17 Nobel, David F., 26, 28 Nollen, J. S., 94 Nordin, D. Sven, 184-185 n. 3 Normal schools, 14, 16, 17-18, 93, 101, 105, 106, 111, 125, 163, 168 Normative control, 66, 68-69, 70, 71-72 North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools (NCA), 123-125, 126, 130-132

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Northwestern University, 91-92, 106, 107-109 Northwest Territory, 83, 91 O Occupational distribution, 136-142 O'Connor, James, 171 Old Northwest, 83, 91 Oral communication, 152 Oratorical skills, 63 Oreapolis Company, 92 Organizational control, 50, 66-72, 73, 74 coercive, 66-67, 70 employee recruitment and, 69-72

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normative, 66, 68-69, 70, 71-72 utilitarian, 66, 67-68, 78 Organizational structure bureaucracy and, xiii, 7-8 delegation of authority and, 149-151, 155 and European model of higher education, 74-79, 115-116, 118 governmental, 8-9 organizational control and, 66-72 of public trust organizations, 8, 38, 152-154 rise of managerial class, xiii, 7, 38, 135, 147-156 worker autonomy and, 7, 36, 38, 59

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Overcredentialism, xv Overeducation, xv Overton, Richard C., 90 P Panic of 1837, 83, 100-101 Panic of 1873, 101, 105, 106 Panic of 1893, 102 Parker, Leonard F., 85, 94, 183 n. 15 Parsons, James R., 27 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 31, 33, 34, 176 n. 2, 181 n. 9 Patronage, 9, 156 Payne, Charles E., 85, 94

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Peabody Education Fund, 126 Pedagogy, standardization of, 8 Pendleton Act (1883), 156 Penmanship, 61 Pensions, 127-128 Perpetual tuition scholarships, 4, 111 Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 66

Page 218

"Practical" instruction, 5 Pranksterism, 5, 115 Presbygationalists, 83-85 Presbyterians, 81, 82-85 Pritchett, Henry S., 126 Professional education, 3, 39, 107-109, 112, 113, 131. See also Graduate education autonomy and, 36, 59 business, 7-8, 73, 77-78, 127, 151-152, 154-156 degree requirements for, 27 engineering, 109, 137

1007/1024

enrollment trends, 13, 14, 17-18, 75, 109 ethnic minorities and, 42 graduate degrees and, 1-2 legal, 109, 142 medical, 105, 106, 109, 142 and monopoly over credentials, xii, 6-7, 38-39, 73, 74 rise of, 4 standardization of, 8, 60 state influence on, 77-78 teacher, 131-132, 142. See also Normal schools theological, 101, 106

1008/1024

women in, 19 years of schooling and, 27 Professional groups, 69 Professionalization, 124-125, 127 Professional monopolies, 38-39, 50, 59-60, 135-136, 144-145, 165-166 Professional positions, bureaucratic positions vs., 49-50, 55, 57-59, 143-147 Protestant religious culture, 39, 40-41, 62, 73, 79-85, 159, 164 Public trust organizations, 8, 38, 152-154 R Race. See Ethnicity

1009/1024

Railroads, 84, 87, 90-91, 92-93, 98, 101, 105, 149, 153 Rashdall, Hastings, 74 Rayitch, Diane, 187 n. 18 Reeves, Ira, 74, 115 Reforms, educational, 5, 113-116, 165 curricular, 5, 26, 113-116 Religion, 38 academies, 39, 40, 75, 112, 118 Catholic, 41, 81-82, 115 colleges and, 79-85, 110, 164 missionary societies, 79, 82-85 Protestant, 39, 40-41, 62, 73, 79-85, 159

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Remedial work, 116, 117 Research universities, 26, 62-63, 129, 168 Reward systems. See Utilitarian control Ricoeur, Paul, 181 n. 10 Riesman, David, 17, 177-178 n. 11 Rituals, 115 Robinson, James H., 120 Rockefeller, John D., 126 Rockefeller Foundation, 8, 32 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 158 Ross, Earle D., 96, 182-183 n. 7 Rowan, Brian, 181 n. 16

1011/1024

Rudolph, Frederick, 5, 80, 110, 111, 114, 115, 185 n. 6 Rush, Benjamin, 78 Russell Sage Foundation, 8 S St. Ignatius College (Loyola University), 109 Salganik, Laura H., 4, 185 n. 6 Scholarships, 4, 111 Schudson, Michael, 189 n. 2 Schultz, Theodore W., 29 Schumann, M. E., 95 Schurman, Jacob G., 126 Scott, Roy V., 110

1012/1024

Sears, Barnas, 98 Second Great Awakening, 81, 85 Sedlack, Michael W., xv, 188 n. 11 Shannon, Fred A., 86, 87 Shapiro, Susan, 56, 160 Shils, Edward, 180 n. 3 Shuey, Brother, 94 Sinclair, Upton, 187 n. 20, 189 n. 7 Skowronek, Stephen, 9, 156 Smallwood, Mary L., 115, 185 n. 7 Smelser, Neil, 189 n. 2 Smith, David N., 31-33 Social attainment, xvi

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Social class connection between education and, xv-xvi, 2, 39-43, 59, 62 and credentialism, xi, 4-7, 48, 51, 53, 82, 83 employment decision and, 160-161 multi-ethnic conflict and, 39-43 social reproduction theory and, x, xvi, 31-36 Socialization, educational system and, 33 Social reproduction theory, x, xvi, 31-36 Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West (SPCTEW), 83-84 Sociology of educational expansion, 43-46 Socolofsky, Homer E., 184 n. 19

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Solberg, Winston U., 93, 97, 109, 115 Solidarity, 68, 69, 71, 115 Soltow, Lee, 62, 181 n. 13 Spear, Norman, 179 n. 22 Specialization, 36, 65 Sports, 115-116

Page 219

Standardization, 8, 36, 59-63, 167-170. See also Accreditation of high school education, 119 labor market, 53 years of schooling and, 27 Stanford University, 151-152 Status groups, x, 6, 38, 160. See also Social class Stevens, S., 62, 181 n. 13 Stinchcombe, Arthur L., 20, 40, 56, 64, 65, 149, 180-181 n. 7-8, 181 n. 14, 182 n. 17, 184 n. 19, 189-190 n. 9 Storr, Richard J., 114, 130, 179 n. 20

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Structural-functionalist theory. See Functionalist theory Stubbs, Michael, 60 Sturtevant, Julian M., 85, 89 Subcontractors, 65 Sweet, William W., 83 Swierenga, Robert P., 87 T Taussig, F. W., 150, 151 Taylor, George R., 86 Teacher colleges, 131-132, 142. See also Normal schools Technical education. See Vocational-technical training

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Technical uncertainty, 59, 64-72 Technological innovation, 25-28 Tewksberry, Donald G., 11, 15, 37, 80, 101, 182 n. 4 Theological schools, 13, 14, 101, 106 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 167 Trow, Martin, 167 True, Alfred C., 96 Trust, 38, 40, 56, 70, 71, 146, 147, 160 Tuition income, 4, 110, 111 Turner, Asa, 85 Turner, Jonathan B., 85, 97 Turner, Ralph H., 176 n. 1

1018/1024

Turner, Victor, 181 n. 16 Tyack, David B., 62, 124-125, 142, 187 n. 18 U Uncertainty control, 59 of labor markets, 50, 55-57, 63-72 of organizational controls, 66-72 regarding technical aspects of tasks, 59, 64-72 Unitarians, 81 United States Bureau of Education (USBE), 11-16, 17-18, 129, 136-137 Universities.

1019/1024

See also specific universities business schools in, 155-156 colleges vs., 129-130 European, 74-79, 115-116, 118 land-grant, 4, 26, 77, 87, 106, 107-109, 110, 111 national movement, 78-79 research, 26, 62-63, 129, 168 state, 95-99 University of Chicago, 108, 130 University of Denver, 92 University of Illinois, 97, 98-99, 107-109, 168 University of Michigan, 118-119, 122, 123

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University of Pennsylvania, 155 Utilitarian control, 66, 67-68, 70 V Vanderlip, Frank, 126 Van Gennep, Arnold, 181 n. 16 Van Riper, Paul P., 9, 158 Van Vleck, George W., 101 Vaughan, Michalina, 178 n. 12, 179 n. 22 Veblen, Thornstein, 7, 32, 88-89, 184-185 n. 3, 189 n. 7 Veblen, Thorstein, 88-89 Veysey, Lawrence, 5, 80, 110, 113, 114, 115, 176-177 n. 3

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Vocational-technical training, x, 32, 77-78, 113-114, 117, 163 W Ward, Henry W., 94 Watson, Elmo S., 93 Wealth, and credentialism, xi, 6-7, 48, 51, 53, 82, 83 Weber, Max, xx, 19-20, 37, 60, 68, 159, 161-162, 164, 180 n. 3, 180 n. 5, 180-181 n. 8 Webster, Martha F., 85, 90 Wechsler, Harold S., 5, 8, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122-123, 185 n. 9, 185-186 n. 11, 186 n. 14 Weigert, Andrew J., 180 n. 7 Welfare programs, 4, 111, 171-173

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Wesley, Edgar B., 112, 120, 186 n. 13, 186 n. 15 Western College, 94 Westward expansion, 83-100 Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, 155 Whitehead, John S., 77, 182 n. 2 Wiebe, Robert H., 105, 106 Wild, Payson S., 107 Wilensky, Harold L., 165 Williamson, Harold F., 107, 188 n. 11 Wilson, Woodrow, 120, 126 Women in college administration, 7

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enrollment of, 17-18, 19, 105 Women's colleges, 105, 106 World War II, 163-164, 170-171 Written communication, 61, 152 Y Yale Band, 85, 89

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