Most of the post-World War II trends in higher education Geiger notes are well known to historians and sociologists. Geiger explores how American colleges and universities from research universities, regional universities, small liberal arts colleges, and community and junior colleges grew physically, in terms of student numbers, in terms of faculty numbers, and in terms of administrative bureaucratic personnel since World War II. He notes that governmental funding--federal, state, and local, scientific, and medical--impacted colleges and universities in the wake of World War II and how changes in this aid impacted universities and colleges and the students who hoped to attend them. He explores how broader social and cultural factors impacted colleges and universities and how broader society and culture reacted to these changes in higher education. He notes how an academic revolution occurred in American higher culture changing the economic and cultural status and curriculum of American colleges and universities. He explores how the selectivity revolution in American higher education enriched--economically, politically, and culturally--private and public research universities, particularly those members of the elite Association of American universities, and elite private research liberal arts colleges. He notes how the number of administrators and contingent or adjunct faculty have risen particularly since the neoliberal revolution in American political culture. He explores how student preparation for college has declined at the same time that grade inflation has increased. He notes how colleges and universities have come to be dominated, particularly on the administrative side, by a consumption and retail model of education in the twenty-first century. He explores how the tensions between the knowledge function, democratic function, and consumer function of American higher education played out in American colleges and universities.
Like any history Geiger's sociological and quantitative history of American higher education is selective. Geiger has little to say about American professional colleges and universities such as law schools, medical schools, and pharmacy schools. He does not explore the tensions that arose in religious universities like Brigham Young University, as Enlightenment "secularisation" impacted these religious institutions and their curriculum. He does not explore the tensions in religious institutions like Catholic University and the University of Notre Dame as they attempted to become research universities. He does not explore the anti-intellectual intellectualism and romanticism of the increasingly mainstream political right, a social movement that has entirely different historical roots than conservatism, in the same way he does that of the New Left. Beyond the culture wars Geiger ignores the cultures of American colleges and universities such as fraternity and sorority culture and sports culture, the last a culture which has strong economic, political, cultural, and geographic impacts on and in American higher education.
Some may find Geiger's American Higher Education Since World War II with its sociological and quantitative emphasis a far too limited and selective approach to American higher education. Some may find it a book that will appeal more to academic administrative bureaucrats and applied quantitative sociologists than to cultural historians. Some may wonder whether Geiger's jeremiad against the lack, in some quarters, of academic emotional attachment to country and his seeming conflation of anti-Americanism and valid criticism of the US politically, economically, and culturally is consistent with the academic emphasis on reason and the scientific method. Some may find Geiger too little attentive to how post-1960s American institutions of higher education reflected the transition from modern society to postmodern society, a society that is grounded in information, the retail sector, consumption, and hyper individualism, and which gave rise to identity and victim cultures particularly on the tail ends of the political spectrum.
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