Higher education in global overview falls into two models. Most countries follow the elitist pattern of re cruitment, and their efforts on behalf of modernity are tem pered by nineteenth-century style. Their reforms reenact familiar historical precedents. Four countries: the United States, Canada, the USSR, and Japan, have moved to mass higher education. Europe, too, has recently begun making sig nificant steps in that direction. These countries are a target of parallel reform aspirations: demands f or expanded enroll ment, for more equitable social class distribution, and for up grading of non-university institutions to university ranks. Their universities are under pressure to participate in political life and local government, to streamline the structure of gov ernance, and to admit a measure of public control. The West ern European countries are in a somewhat special situation because their enrollments in postcompulsory education are a quarter of an age group less, and their reforms tend to be structural rather than, as in the others, curricular. Among mass-higher-education countries, the USSR and Japan are in many respects closer to Europe than to North America. They favor a guided method of reform from above, while those of North America grow and change in a grass roots fashion. The arrival of the mass of students makes authoritarian control difficult to maintain.