In the decade since the Great Recession, doomsday reports of higher education's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Ten years later, what's really changed? If your answer, like mine, is not much, then maybe it's time to accept that the academic apocalypse is not at hand and that America's centuries-old, sprawling system of colleges and universities isn't going anywhere anytime soon. So instead of wasting time trying to guess the future, we'd be better served studying the past and figuring out why the old, ramshackle, brick-and-mortar higher education system continues to ramble on.

In his cleverly titled, provocative study, David Labaree seeks to do just that. Cutting against the conventional wisdom that the once-mighty American system of higher learning has succumbed to a host of irreparable structural infirmities—led by runaway costs and spiraling student debt due to reduced funding and administrative bloat—Labaree insists things aren't that bad, really. No doubt the system is a mess, but it's still perfect, and would-be reformers and zealots should leave well enough alone. There's no unbundling, transforming, or disrupting needed here.

This argument is refreshingly unconventional—the first of many surprises Labaree has in store. Another surprise is his claim that the chief virtue of the American higher education system, the very source of its perfection, as Labaree would have it, is an “educational market” that encourages and rewards “entrepreneurial autonomy” (p. 5). Building on political scientist Louis Hartz's classic argument in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), as interpreted by sociologist Martin Trow, Labaree claims that American colleges were born free in a “market environment” unspoiled by either feudal remnants or suffocating government oversight (p. 6). Labaree's devotion to the market runs deep and it serves as the main animating force of the history he tells. This is a history that, by his own admission, largely eschews “contextual factors,” the usual stuff of the historian's craft, and instead privileges “structural elements,” such as money and power, which let the system develop more or less sui generis (p. 4). Indeed, early on Labaree likens the growth of colleges and universities to an “evolutionary process” impervious to human interference, matter-of-factly stating, “The U.S. system of higher education, however, did not arise from a plan, and no agency governs it. It just happened” (p. 2).

The first three chapters of the book cover Labaree's version of what happened, as he chronicles the improbable triumph of the American college in the nineteenth century. Absent reliable funding or public support, college builders made the best of a difficult situation. College boosters, backed by enthusiastic but indigent religious orders, had no choice but to act entrepreneurially, and from the very start they relied on student tuition revenue to survive. The battle for scarce resources necessitated a flexible administrative structure, led by a powerful president and a lay board who together strategized ways to stoke “consumer demand” (p. 8). Against long odds they succeeded, and in so doing paved the way for the modern university. Comparatively well funded and festooned with all manner of fun and games, from football to fraternity parties, the new university emerged as the “pinnacle” of a highly decentralized education system made up of a radically plural mix of two- and four-year public and private, (mostly) nonprofit colleges and universities (p. 47).

Having dissected the component parts of the system, Labaree spends the rest of the book evaluating the system's performance and, in particular, the “central tensions” that shudder through it (p. 71). Here, his considerable gifts for subtly (and not so subtly) challenging how we think about higher education's core mission of research, teaching, and service are put on full display. Labaree offers up imaginative reflections on the durability of the liberal arts in an era of ascendant professional education (chapter 4), the reproduction of class inequality (chapter 5), the outsized influence of nominally “private” institutional norms and behaviors on the rest of the higher education sector (chapter 6), Americans’ perception of higher education as primarily a “private good” (chapter 7), and, in the penultimate chapter, the “trickl[e] down” effects “elite” research universities and their experts have on the marketplace of ideas, which dovetails nicely with chapter 4 (p. 175).

Readers’ openness to these claims will depend on their receptivity to Labaree's larger argument that “American higher education is deeply rooted in markets rather than politics” (p. 142). Historians of all subfields and periods of America, from colonial times to the contemporary era, have explored the power of the market in the expansion of slavery and the coming of the Civil War, the spread of evangelical religion, the development of the American state, and the rise of the New Right, to cite just a few examples. So, too, historians of American higher education. Various evocations of the market model, sometimes used interchangeably with “privatization” or “neoliberalism,” have become the preferred way to explain the development and, by most estimates, perversion of American higher education since the 1970s.

Labaree extends the market framework well beyond the more recent past in order to explain the entire history of American higher education. Certainly, Labaree is correct that the system has always existed in a labyrinthine arrangement of markets where real and metaphoric goods and services are exchanged, but his decision to minimize other contributing causal factors, like politics and policy-making, demographic and technological developments, and changes in the labor market, comes at a price. For a study purportedly interested in uncovering the “mess” beneath the American higher education system, it is striking just how neat and tidy his study is, as everything and everyone gets swept up by the market's inexorable powers: students are “consumers” (including in the nineteenth century), presidents the “CEO,” education a “product,” and, except for a brief moment during the Cold War, a “private” one at that. Even Labaree himself gets carried away by book's end, imploring his reader to resist the temptation to interfere with the workings of the market to try and fix it or make it better: “Why ruin a perfect mess? In order to enjoy its benefits, we need to leave it alone,” he writes (p. 196).

If only the “educational market” self-corrected as well as the perfect market of an economics textbook. A slightly different version of these events, one using much of the same wonderful evidence marshaled here, would necessarily highlight the contingent nature of the market and the different ways in which institutions and individuals have understood, interacted with, and challenged it over time. Such an account would not only reveal the role that government and politics have played in shaping the market, but also how generations of students, administrators, faculty, and the wider public have shaped and been shaped by it too. From the colonial charters to the land on which the land grants were built, from segregation and integration to coeducation, from the birth of research and development to the development of modern financial aid, the educational market is, and always has been, a time-bound historical construction forged by state action, economic booms and busts, war, social movements, and, of course, the cumulative impact of countless decisions and choices individuals themselves make. The sooner we realize this the better—and the sooner all students will be able to enjoy higher education's benefits.