Accessibility is one of the pillars of the American system of higher education. It is traditionally held that higher education should be "readily and widely accessible to persons of a broad range of abilities, circumstances, and ages." A basic philosophy concerning access can be found in the report of the 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education. In addressing access, the report went on to state, "Too many of our citizens have tacitly assumed that the ladder of opportunity for education was equally accessible to all children and youth. For the great majority of our boys and girls, the kind and amount of education they may hope to attend depends, not on their own abilities, but on the family or community into which they happened to be born, or worse still, on the color of their skin or religion of their parents" (p. 10). In calling for reform, the report outlined the difficulties facing the academy and offered higher education as a means of advancing the nation's science and technology community to meet the growing tensions of the cold war. Through an examination of historical periods and social movements in the coming years, this chapter explores ways in which academe has addressed the problems expressed in 1947 by the President's Commission.