The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first called educational entrepreneurship as a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time.

第二次世界大战后，美国高等教育的大规模扩张是一个社会学难题：在高度联盟的政体中，国家能力建设的壮举是一项壮举。先前的奖学金将学术带头人列为这一扩展的主要驱动力，但其活动的可能性和命运的条件仍未明确。我们通过理论上将兰德尔·柯林斯（Randall Collins）称为教育企业家精神的理论来填补这一空白作为美国政体的一种特殊战略行动。我们认为，在美国国情背景下，大学的文化权威和组织中心地位与历史偶然性相结合，在情节上创造了条件，在这些条件下，可以使学术证书成为解决社会问题的可行解决方案。我们通过回顾和扩展一个范式案例来检验我们的理论化：1945年至1969年斯坦福大学工程教育的扩展。援引多个同时期和随后的案例，我们展示了将教育扩展理论化的希望，这是战略行动的结果。随着时间的推移专门定位演员。