The argument in this book is that higher education faces a general crisis that goes beyond the perennial challenges of financial sustainability, adjusting to new learning paradigms and new patterns of knowledge production, evolving new models of organisation and so on, and even beyond more immediate and urgent challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global warming. The roots of that crisis are to be found in the doubts that have accumulated about the development of mass higher education over the past 60 years, its balance sheet of gains and losses. Has expansion merely consolidated existing social hierarchies, lightly modified them, or has it challenged and eroded them? Has it created a middle-class meritocracy, still largely shaped by family fortune? In the economy, has the large-scale production of graduates powered growth and productivity by boosting skills, or has it created new divisions between the academically and professionally credentialised and those resentfully left behind? In the cultural sphere, has it created ‘citizens of nowhere’, cosmopolitan metro-elites, and patronisingly eroded more traditional forms of identity, community and meaning?

Once, these questions could be answered with confidence. Mass higher education was a work in progress, with an overwhelmingly positive balance sheet. Today, the doubts have accumulated, within higher education itself and in wider society (at any rate, as expressed through public and political discourses; the choices and aspirations of individuals continue to tell a different story). Not everyone will accept that this shift in mood has taken place, denying the seriousness or even reality of this general crisis. With entire justification, they will offer as counterevidence an accumulation of ‘good news’ about universities and colleges. But it sometimes feels like whistling nervously in the dark.

There are three possible responses to this general crisis. The first, closely linked to the belief that such a crisis does not exist or is essentially trivial, is to muddle through. Forget the big picture, which will take care of itself, any clouds will disperse, and focus instead on detailed reforms. In an important sense, such a response is correct and necessary. In the short run, what else is to be done, especially by policy makers and institutional leaders but also by rank-and-file academics? The second response is to roll back mass expansion, to argue that retrenchment to a more traditional university core is necessary in order to preserve higher education's quality and essential purpose.