The advent of mass schooling played a pivotal role in European societies of the later nineteenth century, transforming rural peasants into national citizens. The late-twentieth-century global expansion of higher education ushered in new transformations, propelling societal rationalization and organizing, and knitting the world into a more integrated society and economy. We address four key dynamics: (1) Higher education sustains the modern professions and contributes to the rationalization of society and state. (2) The supranational and universalistic orientation of higher education provides elites with shared global cultural frames and identities, facilitating globalization. (3) Consequently, tertiary education provides a foundation for major global movements and sociopolitical change around diverse issues, such as human rights and environmental protection as well as potentially contentious religious and cultural solidarities. (4) Higher education contributes to the reorganization of the economy, creating new monetarized activities and facilitating the reconceptualization of activities distant from material production as economic. In short, many features of the contemporary world arise from the growing legions of people steeped in common forms of higher education. Panel regression models of contemporary cross-national longitudinal data examine these relationships. We find higher-education enrollments are associated with key dimensions of rationalization, globalization, societal mobilization, and expansion of the service economy. Central features of modern society, often seen as natural, in fact hinge on the distinctive form of higher education that has become institutionalized worldwide.

大规模教育的出现在19世纪后期的欧洲社会中起着举足轻重的作用，使农村农民转变为国民。二十世纪后期全球高等教育的扩张带来了新的变革，推动了社会合理化和组织化，并将世界编织成一个更加一体化的社会和经济。我们处理四个主要动力：（1）高等教育维持着现代职业，并为社会和国家的合理化做出了贡献。（2）高等教育的超国家和普遍主义取向为精英阶层提供了共享的全球文化框架和身份，从而促进了全球化。（3）因此，高等教育为围绕各种问题的重大全球运动和社会政治变革奠定了基础，例如人权与环境保护，以及潜在的有争议的宗教和文化团结。（4）高等教育为经济的重组做出了贡献，创造了新的货币化活动，并促进了将远离物质生产的活动重新概念化为经济。简而言之，当代世界的许多特征源于越来越多的人沉迷于普通的高等教育形式。当代跨国纵向数据的面板回归模型检验了这些关系。我们发现，高等教育入学人数与合理化，全球化，社会动员和服务经济扩张的关键维度相关。现代社会的核心特征，通常被视为自然的，