This is my thesis which I wrote during my fourth and last year, 2010, at Vassar College with Professor Leonard Nevarez ( http://faculty.vassar.edu/lenevare/ ) as my advisor. As the title indicates, I argue that higher education has become, essentially, a business. Within the framework of the history of the United States of America, I trace the evolution of higher education from the mid-nineteenth century into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in order to make my case. In the process, I also touch upon the political economy of the US during its own "industrial revolution" and its journey to a world power. In the end, I developed a work of social and economic history (or historical sociology) for Vassar's sociology department. Likewise, given its emphasis on the evolution of an institution, readers may also see it as an attempt at historically grounded institutional analysis.
