ABSTRACT
In most European countries higher education developed as the privilege and prerequisite of the upper classes. For the bulk of the populace, most education ended by the early teens, with the later years of school spent largely in vocational training. Until the 1960s almost no continental European country sent more than 5 or 6 percent of its youth through universities. The government has used two indirect methods to allow the expansion of higher educational opportunities: the chartering of universities, particularly private universities, and the nonenforcement of minimum legal standards for university conditions. The minister of education has the ultimate responsibility for chartering universities, and no university may be established without a charter. In practice, charters are granted on the basis of investigations of university conditions by the ministry’s University Chartering Council, and in the case of private universities additional investigations into the fiscal standing of the “legal person” establishing the university by the ministry’s Private Universities Council.
