The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War Two Roger L. Geiger. Princeton University Press, 2015.Since the 1990s, there has been a belief in the United States that all citizens should go to college; indeed, this trope has been part and parcel of most politicians' stump speeches since the Clinton presidency. While most citizens of the United States view the idea of going to favorably, they do not understand the true purpose of what a university means or the differences among institutions. A reading of Roger Geiger's excellent The History of American Higher Education will help fill in some of these blanks: readers will understand that the purpose of higher education is not, nor has it ever been, learn more earn more; instead, as Geiger argues, higher education in the United States has achieved four results that rank the system among the best in the world:It [has] preserved and entrenched a tradition of liberal education as a fundamental attribute of a college education for all students, not just an elite. It [has] augmented that tradition by incorporating applied and practical studies on the same collegiate and postgraduate levels. It thus produced the first system of mass higher education, largely through individual public and private institutions responding independently to student demand. It also developed the capacity to teach and advance academic subjects on the highest level, achieving world-leading status for American science. (x)Geiger is arguably the most prolific scholar of higher education in historic context in the United States. In previous works, he has focused on particular eras (To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940, 1986) or trends (Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace, 2004) within higher education. Exceeding the limits of any of the excellent institutional case studies published in the last few decades, Geiger's latest volume is the most comprehensive he has produced to date, expanding chronologically and thematically from other texts such as Frederick Rudolph's The American College and University: A History (1990) or the Michael Bastedo, Philip Altbach, and Patricia Gumport edited collection, American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political and Economic Challenges (2016).Broken out into fifty sections organized into twelve chapters, the overall purpose of the work is to emphasize change over time, the essence of historical analysis (xi) regarding US higher education. The first two chapters explore higher education through the colonial era. Chapter One looks at the first three universities in the United States: Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. …