Historians of education have never considered the problem of institutional economics to be very important. Almost nothing has been written in the field. The absence of inquiries into the financial basis of American higher education is a reflection of three major problems in the scholarship of education: (1) the lack of monographic literature in the economics of education; (2) the lack of a coherent theory of institutions and the relations between their organizational and substantive features; and (3) the lack of a coherent theory of society in which institutional patterns could be systematically related to familial, social-structural, economic, and other patterns of activity. This persistent tendency of the social sciences to proceed along narrowly disciplinary lines has resulted in a series of systems that are internally consistent but that bear small resemblance to the real world. The much neglected field of educational economics has far more to offer than even its practitioners imagine. It seems very likely that the key to understanding the development of the American social structure lies in the complex relationship between the endowed institutions, their clientele, and the economy. (Author/MSE)