2020 was not a good year for the university. In a 10/19/20 letter to leaders of Congress, the president of the American Council on Education (ACE) Ted Mitchell writes that “American higher education faces an existential crisis.”1 The letter details the pandemic's impact on colleges and universities, relating that the combination of lost revenues and additional expenses has resulted in massive losses for institutions. Asking for $120 billion in federal support, ACE points out that US higher education serves over 25 million learners and employs over 3.8 million faculty and staff. As Mitchell points out, this makes the higher education industry larger than “the accommodation and airline industries combined.”Readers of The University and the Global Knowledge Society will be unsurprised by ACE's claims about the university”s scale and centrality. For Frank and Meyer, the university's growth should be central in any narrative of the formation of our modern and hyper-modern (post-1990) society. The global university has supplanted (or co-opted) many of the modern (post-1800) institutional sources of status and authority. Through the authors' lens, the hyper-modern university is the key actor in constructing our contemporary knowledge society. Education has even encroached on, or supplanted, the role of religious faith in explaining “the fundamental nature of being by interpreting local facts in light of transcendent truths” (3). Nowadays, when we think of the university, we often think of the many existential crises that the sector now faces. These crises include the pandemic-driven economic devastation that is resulting in wide-spread university layoffs and potential institutional closures. Before the pandemic, the university was living through the twin crises of public disinvestment and demographic headwinds, resulting in declining demand when tuition-revenues are increasingly essential to balance budgets.In The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich, Carnevale and co-authors lay out the crisis of concentrated wealth and growing inequality across universities. These authors point out that two-thirds of selective private institutions have reduced the share of students they admit from the families in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution over the past three decades. At the most selective colleges, 60 percent of students come from the most affluent families. This concentration of privilege is taken to its farthest extreme at “Ivy Plus” colleges (the eight members of the Ivy league plus Duke, MIT, the University of Chicago, and Stanford). At these schools, close to one-in-six students are the children of parents in the top one percent of the income distribution. The offspring of the most affluent parents, with incomes over $2.2 million annually (placing them in one-tenth of one percent), are 117 times more likely to attend these most elite universities than are those whose parents are in the bottom fifth of the income distribution.The authors of The University and the Global Knowledge Society acknowledge that the vast majority of the scholarship on higher education focuses on the differences between institutions, rather than understanding the university as either a unified idea or a singular institutional force. For Frank and Meyer, what is most interesting about the university is not the challenges that it may face (funding, demographic, etc.) or the stratification across its constituents, but instead the entirety of its global trajectory. Indeed, when we step back and view the university as a unified (or universal) entity, rather than a fractured ecosystem, its rise is astounding. The authors cite a 2015 study that counted 23,887 postsecondary institutions worldwide, with over 60 percent of these colleges and universities located outside North America and Europe. Compare this figure to the baseline of approximately 190 universities that were in existence between 1500 and 1800. This growth in the number of colleges and universities has been accompanied, or perhaps driven by the global increase in postsecondary students. This global growth in postsecondary students, both in numbers and as a proportion of the population, has been given the memorable name of the “massification” of higher education.2 In 1900, there were approximately 500,000 students enrolled in higher education institutions worldwide (representing less than 1 percent of all college-age people). By 1970, international enrollment had climbed to 32.6 million. Today, there are about 250 million students enrolled at colleges and universities across the world.Beyond the nearly exponential growth in institutions and students, Frank and Meyer marshal various evidence to demonstrate the university's expanding claim to knowledge. They observe that the professors' gaze now legitimately falls on every sphere of social, cultural, economic, and political life. This expansion of domains in which academia has laid claim to investigation and explanation has been accompanied by the university's organizational expansion, as represented in the ever-proliferating number of academic divisions and departments. The authors are at pains to point out this is a global phenomenon. In one particularly illustrative table (4.6, pp. 78–79), the range of major academic divisions at three universities (the Free University of Amsterdam, The University of Texas—Austin, and the University of Belgrade) is compared from 1895 and 2019. In 1895, each of these universities had three major academic divisions, with Law, Philosophy, Theology, Literature/Science/Art, Medicine, and Engineering distributed across the institutions. By 2019, the range of major academic divisions has dramatically expanded, with the University of Belgrade (98,000 students) having 30 major academic divisions, ranging from Agriculture to Veterinary Medicine.What might we make of The University and Global Knowledge Society when read during the depth of a global pandemic, one that threatens the economic viability of so many institutions? Further, can we have confidence in university-trained researchers' universal cultural legitimacy and university-based science when the highest level of government seeks to ignore and de-legitimize findings on topics as diverse as public health and climate change? The university may have helped create and become inseparable from a service-based knowledge economy, but its prospects in the West and Japan are in doubt. The combination of rapid population aging and declining public (state) support has put the viability of many smaller private institutions in jeopardy while making it more difficult for low-income and middle-class families to afford public institutions. However, the West and Japan might be the wrong place to look to in calibrating the future of the university. The number of students enrolled in colleges and universities worldwide is projected to increase to almost 600 million by 2040. Virtually all that growth will be outside of North America and Europe. By 2040, East Asia and Pacific regions will account for over 40 percent of all global university students, enrolling almost 260 million learners. South and West Asia will be next, accounting for 160 million university students or 27 percent of all global students. Latin America will grow to over 65 million students, while the Arab States and Sub-Saharan Africa will combine for over 40 million students. This compares to a projected 44 million university students in 2040 for all of North America and Western Europe, equaling just over 7 percent of the world's share (Calderon, 2018). The university's story is no longer a Western story, but an Asian, Latin American, and Arab, and African narrative.As Frank and Meyer point out in the introduction, “Education, and especially university education, is a foremost means of producing—symbolically, and to some extent in reality—this dramatically empowered individual being” (p. 7). For the authors, explanations of the university's growth that rely on demographic causes (such as population growth) or economic drivers (employment training) are incomplete. In this telling, the university has emerged as the primary institution in which individuals find and make meaning. Universities, and university degreed and certified professionals, are the new arbiters of beliefs and behaviors, replacing other authorities such as religious representatives and hereditary elites. Extending the arguments of The University and the Global Knowledge Society forward requires us to conclude that the university's cultural impact is set to expand. In the decades to come, these empowered university-educated humans will live predominantly in the world's emerging economies. Today, China (44 million students) and India (32 million students) dominate global enrollment rankings. Looking back from 2040, these current numbers from East and South Asia will seem nearly as minuscule as the pre-high-modern period (post-1945) in the West.The question of a university education's impact on individual identity and society-wide social relations (from the labor market to marriage markets) in the massified Asian, African, and Latin American context remains unaddressed by Frank and Meyer. If the university both made and reflected the rationalized knowledge society of the West during its rapid growth in the now rich world, shouldn't the university have the same impact in the world's emerging economies as they come to dominate the postsecondary ecosystem? The University and the Global Knowledge Society will prove helpful to scholars of higher education, as the authors provide a framework to build hypotheses around the shape and impact of the global twenty-first-century university.