Prevailing perspectives attribute higher education’s immense and increasing importance in modern societies nearly exclusively to the economic value of a college degree and role of higher education in the legitimation of stratification. This forecloses consideration of the possibility that higher education’s power and influence may derive, in part, from its own considerable moral or symbolic significance in modern culture. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with adult undergraduates in the United States I explore the meaning of higher education in contemporary culture, drawing principally on institutional theory. The bachelor’s degree emerges as the central and default indicator of not only intelligence but valued moral traits: responsibility, tenacity, and ambition. College completion confirms/constitutes graduates as agentic selves to both others and themselves, and indicates assimilation of scientific and cosmopolitan universalism. I suggest that these findings can be explained through three interrelated, institutionalized interpretation rules: education is a strong moral good, education changes the self, and education accesses the universal. And I argue that we must take seriously the insight—often made but little-explored—that higher education is a quasi-religious as well as an economic institution.

普遍的观点将高等教育在现代社会中的巨大和日益重要的重要性几乎完全归因于大学学位的经济价值和高等教育在分层合法化中的作用。这就排除了对高等教育的力量和影响可能部分源于其在现代文化中相当大的道德或象征意义的可能性的考虑。通过对美国成年本科生的深度访谈分析，我主要借鉴了制度理论，探讨了高等教育在当代文化中的意义。学士学位不仅是智力的核心和默认指标，也是重要的道德品质的核心和默认指标：责任、坚韧和雄心。大学毕业确认/构成毕业生对他人和自己的代理自我，并表明科学和世界主义普遍主义的同化。我认为这些发现可以通过三个相互关联的、制度化的解释规则来解释：教育是一种强烈的道德善、教育改变自我、教育通向普遍性。我认为，我们必须认真对待这样一种洞察力——这种洞察力经常被提出，但很少被探索——高等教育既是一种准宗教，又是一种经济机构。