Development of the Sociology of Higher Education

A sociology of higher education has emerged in the quarter-century since World War II. It is now a field with several important streams of interest: the two major foci of educational inequality beyond the secondary level and the social-psychological effects of college on students; and smaller literatures on the academic profession and governance and organization. In the 1970s, some parts of the field face the danger of expensive trivialization, others of substituting playful journalism for scholarly discipline. Encouraging prospects for the near future include more extensive development of comparative studies and analyses with historical depth. A useful additional step would be to counter the dominant instrumental definitions of education with approaches that center on the values, traditions, and identities-the expressive components-of educational social systems.