History of the University System

Guest: Christopher Carlsmith, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell A college degree is still an important way for Americans to climb the socioeconomic ladder, but recent analysis by researchers at Harvard and Stanford finds the universities that are best at launching poor students into a higher income bracket are also admitting a lot fewer low-income students than they used to.   That’s just the latest data point in the debate over how affordable and accessible the all-important-college education is in America. Believe it or not, this debate goes back centuries - millennia, even - to the very first university, which was founded in Italy in 1088. The University of Bologna has been offering degrees continuously since then and served as an important model for the birth of the university as we know it today.