World War II stands as a defining moment for American higher education. During the crisis of international relations that existed by the late 1930s, American thinkers of various stripes felt compelled to mobilize the country's intellectual and educational resources in defense of democracy, thus creating “a great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war.” The war aims of the United States—as enunciated in the Atlantic Charter and popular portrayals of the “good war” in which the United States fought to free the world from the grips of evil dictatorships—gave tremendous legitimacy to these efforts, which built into a national discussion on the goals of higher education. Between 1943 and 1947, at least five major reports on general education or liberal education appeared, three of which explicitly treated the relation of such education to “democracy” or “free society.”

The 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education, popularly known as the Truman Commission, offered a remarkable vision, one of an expansive, inclusive and diverse system of postsecondary education in the United States. It appeared just as hundreds of thousands of former GIs poured onto the nation's campuses, taking advantage of a little heralded program to provide tuition and other benefits to veterans of the recently concluded World War II. As it turned out, both of these events signaled the beginning of a remarkable period of expansion in higher education. The postwar years have been described as the third great period of growth in the history of American education, a development that took decades to unfold. While the Commission suggested that nearly half of the nation's youth could benefit from collegiate education, it limited its projections to just thirteen years (to 1960). In fact, it took more than twice as long to approach such high levels of popular participation in higher education, and the most dramatic growth occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. In other respects, however, the President's commissioners' projections for change in enrollment patterns look remarkably prescient in retrospect. Even if they missed the timing of college growth and the significant role women played in it, their report still managed to anticipate a very broad process of change. By 1980 the collegiate student population had come to embody much of the inclusiveness and diversity that they had envisaged some thirty-three years earlier.

In the decades following World War II, access to higher education became an important vehicle for expanding opportunity in the United States. The African American-led Civil Rights Movement challenged discrimination in higher education at a time when state and federal government leaders saw strengthening public higher education as necessary for future economic growth and development. Nationally, the 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education report Higher Education for American Democracy advocated dismantling racial, geographic, and economic barriers to college by radically expanding public higher education, to be accomplished in large part through the development of community colleges. Although these goals were widely embraced across the country, in the South, white leaders rejected the idea that racial segregation stood in the way of progress. During the decades following World War II, white southern educational and political leaders resisted attempts by civil rights organizations to include desegregation as part of the expansion of public higher education.