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nonvets entered higher education. The GIs, who pioneered so much of modern consumer America in the 1950s, including the necessity of owning a car and a house, turned a college degree into a required consumer product, mandatory for all classes of Americans. Henceforth, for a person to succeed in the United States, he or she needed a college diploma.
    America’s colleges and universities welcomed this new public attitude—it helped reposition them from their historic place on the periphery of American society to the center of postwar commerce and prosperity. Once a college degree became an indispensable consumer item, it guaranteed schools a large and continuous stream of students. It also convinced legislators and taxpayers to support higher education with much more public money than ever before.

    Previous to 1945, in the entire history of American higher education, change had occurred at a relatively slow pace. At the end of WWII, higher education entered a phone booth as mild-mannered Clark Kent and came out as Superman, bursting with muscles and money, ready to take on the world. The postwar university soon became, in the words of the president of the fastest-growing school in the country, the University of California, “a multiversity,” enrolling many more students than previously. Yet, the traditional student subcultures continued, the vocational one competing for pride of place on some campuses with the collegiate and academic ones.
    Not all undergraduates liked this configuration, and, in the 1950s, the rebel subculture, long in existence but marginal at almost every school, began to grow in numbers and importance. Then, in the 1960s—to the bewilderment and distaste of the majority of Americans—the rebels became the largest student group at many institutions, permanently influencing the future of higher education and American society.
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    Rebel Culture
    Some kind of self-consciously nonconformist [rebel] exists in many of the best small liberal arts colleges and among the undergraduates in the leading universities. These students are often deeply involved with ideas, both the ideas they encounter in their classrooms and those that are current in the wider society of adult art, literature, and politics … .
    The distinctive quality of this student style is a rather aggressive nonconformism, a critical detachment from the college they attend and from its faculty.
    â€”Burton Clark and Martin Trow, sociologists

    The goal of rebel students in all eras has been self-development, finding their own way through the maze of higher education and into the complexity of adult society. As part of their search for identity, rebel students exhibit a selective studiousness. Unlike the collegians and vocationals, they are not anti-intellectual. When rebel students enjoy a college course, they do the required work in it and much more, usually attaining a top grade; however, when they dislike a course’s content, they dismiss it as irrelevant to their personal interests, and often disappear from class, accepting a low grade, even an F. Rebels differ from academic students who pursue an A in every class, whether they like the material or not, and who always try to please their faculty parents.

    Rebel students often do not relate to their professors, even in the courses in which they work hard. Rebels see their “nonconformist” values in conflict with “straight” academic ones, and, as Clark and Trow indicate, “To a much greater degree than their academically oriented classmates, these students use off-campus groups and currents of thought as points of reference … in their strategy of independence and criticism” of university and all other authorities. The connection of rebel students to vital parts of the wider culture, notably the political and artistic avant-gardes, occurred throughout the twentieth century and became this subculture’s most important