The New Era of the 1980s

In the new era of the 1980s, then, universities could no longer rely upon enrollment growth, state governments, or federal agencies to find the additional resources needed to accommodate the inherent expansiveness of their intellectual activities. The research universities, together with the rest of American higher education, entered the 1980s with considerable trepidation. Increases in student tuition brought the most additional revenues to universities in the 1980s. These increases were originally prompted by inflation, but persisted even after inflation subsided. Universities expanded their research in the 1980s by catering to the programmatic needs of sponsors, and for that reason many of the tasks they added were increasingly removed from their academic core. In the domain of social responsibility, by way of contrast, a new ideological mandate for American universities only became fully evident late in the 1980s.