This epilogue argues that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, a social ethos of affluence dominated American higher education—a transformation that has hardly gone unnoticed. Most recently, the already-aggressive pursuit of wealth by both educational institutions and their students has intensified through what many observers have labeled the corporatization of higher education. Of course, corporate values have been influencing higher education for well over a hundred year. In recent decades, however, the change has been of a much greater magnitude in both style and substance, as affluence-oriented colleges and universities have shifted from being influenced by commercial values to becoming corporate entities, with some higher-education institutions being established as for-profit corporations.
