ABSTRACT
In advanced industrial nations the managerial, professional and technical elites are increasingly composed of people with higher education, despite important national differences. In the USA and Japan some 85 per cent of senior managers have degrees, while the figure for Britain is 24 per cent (Handy 1989, 123). This reflects distinct ideologies, traditions, and educational policies in different societies, as well as differences in the use of academic qualifications in occupational selection (Anderson 1962, Green 1990). In England in the 19th century, higher education was solely vocational, developed on the European university self-governing model from the monastic disciplines, for training the priesthood and later embracing the professions of law and medicine. Following political and industrial revolutions, the landed aristocracy preserved its position in society by cultivating an elite culture based upon Greek and Latin classics. The generally accepted version of events is that the rising industrial and commercial elites with whom it shared power could buy land but could not buy social acceptance save by educating their sons to forsake trade and marry into the aristocracy, thus saving that social anachronism from extinction (Barnett 1986, Landes 1969). A practice which led the historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, to comment that during the 19th century:
an industrial revolution, having triumphed at home, was carried over the whole world by the elite of a society bred upon the literature of a city state and an empire whose slave-owning ruling class regarded industry and commerce as essentially vulgar.1
