ABSTRACT
The contemporary American university is an amalgam borrowed from western Europe, most particularly England and Germany. The assumptions underlying the undergraduate curriculum were originally English, while graduate education is grounded in German scholarship and science. Although there is no denying that graduate education, marked by research and the advancement of the individual scholar, was securely entrenched, nonetheless, it was for the most part superimposed on the English-style college. Meritocracies are organizations in which people are assigned tasks and responsibilities and successive power, prestige, and rewards, on the basis of competence. Jencks and Riesman believe that meritocracy is playing an increasingly important part in the American experience. In 1970, of the 2,556 institutions of higher education in the United States, 159 were classified by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare as universities, 1,506 were classified as other four-year institutions, and the remaining 891 were two-year colleges. The enrollments for these three categories were 2,996,506; 3,291,690; and 2,209,921, respectively.
