colleges and universities: Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Since the early 20th cent. universities have played an increasingly important role in scientific and technical research, largely as a result of social and governmental demands for these services. The nationalization and bureaucratization of research functions has been especially marked in the United States, where various government agencies dispense large amounts of money to both public and private universities for research purposes. The federal government also provides direct aid to various categories of students, such as veterans and disadvantaged students.

Since World War II there has been worldwide proliferation of new universities, expansion of old ones, and merging of small institutions into larger university systems. As former colonies gained independence during the 1960s and 1970s, each struggled to define its specific educational needs and establish a university system. In Africa, for example, universities were established in Ghana and Nigeria in 1948, in the Côte d'Ivoire in 1959, and in Congo (Kinshasa) in 1971.

Further proliferation has occurred as a result of the desire for political equality. Educational reforms in Japan, for example, have decreed that there must be at least one national university in each of 47 sections of the country, so that there are now more than 80 such institutions. Similar pressures operated in Great Britain, where seven new universities were established in the 1960s alone, and in the United States, where the State Univ. of New York grew from a small group of teacher training colleges in 1948 to a multicampus system with some 460,000 students in 2010.

The development of radio and television led to their use as an alternative means of instruction, but the broadcasting of university courses was generally not significant except in a few cases (see Open Univ.). The rise of the Internet has led to the development of online instruction, one result of which has been the rise of educational institutions that teach most or all of their classes online. The development of universities (and colleges) the operate largely online has also contributed to an increase in the United States of the number of institutions that are run on a for-profit basis. Many universities now use various combinations of online and classroom instruction depending on the course being taught; videos of classroom sessions are often posted on a university website for the benefit of students. So-called massive open online courses are designed to be available to anyone with a suitable Internet connection, and can reach beyond the walls of the classroom to enroll tens of thousands of students in a single class.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
• Early Years to 1900
• Nineteenth Century
• Early History
• Bibliography

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