Higher Education in the American West offers the first comprehensive regional history of American higher education, examining the role of each state within four subregions, and demonstrates the importance of understanding the American West's role in higher education nationally. It concentrates on the fifteen-state western region served by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education compact. Spanning the years 1818 to 2013, campus and state leaders advanced the West's one thousand two hundred public and private institutions of higher learning through the rough founding pioneer days and later nineteenth-century land-grant expansion era to their communities and citizens, reaching contemporary acclaim as world-class research universities during the contemporary service era. The companion volume, Public Policy Challenges Facing Higher Education in the American West, further explores seven current-day regional policy issues in the fifteen western states.