ABSTRACT
During the latter decades of the twentieth century, the place of higher education in British society has been transformed. Until the 1960s, the universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs) impinged relatively little on the lives of most people. The expansion of higher education since then – and especially during the later 1980s and early 1990s – has enormously widened its range of influence. Although at any one time it remains only a minority of people who participate in higher education directly, this minority is much larger than hitherto and is drawn from a wider cross-section of society. Moreover, probably the bulk of the population now have relatives and friends who are higher education students. Today, Britain much more closely approximates the USA’s experience of higher education as a ‘normal’ phenomenon than it did even twenty years ago, although the effects of this on wider social relations are, as yet, only imperfectly understood.
