In many respects higher education since 1968 has been or has been urged to be qualitatively different from higher education prior to that time. Concerns and misunderstandings over the nature and purposes of higher education are produced in part by the urged displacement of the primacy of rationality and cognition by the affective, experiential, and, in some situations, the irrational. Worries about closing college doors are generated through efforts to extend postsecondary education into a social meliorist role. One possible solution is that institutions of higher education could attempt to return to the core function of education for the young, to the supportive function of creating new knowledge needed for education and for rendering limited services that derive directly from the education and research function. Limited resources should go to the young of whatever group, to prepare them to understand, cope with, and eventually control a complex technological society. (Author/MSE)