We need conceptual assistance in thinking about access to higher education, systematic categories that will help us analyze and compare the national academic structures that condition problems of access and solutions thereto. An approach that centers on basic structure directs attention to the heavy historical momentum of massive systems of higher education and encourages a long-run view of innovations, releasing us from the need to write the latest chapter on current events. Even small advances in the system ordinarily require time spans of five to ten years, or even a quarter of a century, instead of the one- and two-year periods within which political and administrative thinking is so often cast. A structural view that is informed by a sense of historical development also points to country-by-country variation in solutions to current problems. Questions of access must be located in the broad matrices of different national structures. (Author/MSE)