Over the past two decades, and across the nation, the university has been undergoing profound changes. These structural changes underpin an emergent philosophy of the new university today -- one that should give pause to anyone concerned about the direction of higher education. For much of the 20th century, and especially after World War II, the university served as the vehicle of upward mobility, the principal pathway to securing a middle-class and eventually upper-middle-class life. Yet that prevailing 20th-century model of the university began to give way in the late 1980s, slowly at first and then more dramatically and visibly with the onset of the new millennium.