What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action, temporality, and the expansion of US higher education

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