World War II was the watershed event for higher education in modern Western societies. (46) Those societies came out of the war with levels of enrollment that had been roughly constant at
3-5% of the relevant age groups during the decades before the war. But after the war, great social and political changes arising out of the successful war against Fascism created a growing demand in European and American economies for increasing numbers of graduates with more than a
secondary school education(47) And the demand that rose in those societies for entry to higher education extended to groups and social classes that had not thought of attending a university before the war. These demands resulted in a very rapid expansion of the systems of higher education, beginning in the 1960s and developing very rapidly (though unevenly) during the 1970s and 1980s.
The growth of higher education manifests itself in at least three quite different ways, and these in turn have given rise to different sets of problems. There was first the rate of growth: (48) in many countries of Western Europe,the numbers of students in higher education doubled within
five-year periods during the 1960s and doubled again in seven, eight, or 10 years by the middle of
the 1970s. Second, growth obviously affected the absolute size both of systems and individual institutions. And third, growth was reflected in changes in the proportion of the
relevant age group enrolled in institutions of higher education.
Each of these manifestations of growth carried its own peculiar problems in its wake. For example, a high growth rate placed great strains on the existing structures of governance, of administration, and above all of socialization. When a faculty or department grows from, say, five to 20 members within three or four years, (49) and when the new staff are predominantly young men and women fresh from postgraduate study, they largely define the norms of academic life in that faculty. And if the postgraduate student population also grows rapidly and there is loss of a close apprenticeship relationship between faculty members and students, the student culture becomes the chief socializing force for new postgraduate students, with consequences for the intellectual and academic life of the institution—this was seen in America as well as in France, Italy, West Germany, and Japan. (50) High growth rates increased the chances for academic innovation; they also weakened the forms and processes by which teachers and students are admitted into a community of scholars during periods of stability or slow growth. In the 1960s and 1970s, European universities saw marked changes in their governance arrangements, with empowerment of junior faculty and to some degree of students as well.
