Historically and today, universities are portrayed as hotbeds of political activism and contention. During moments of protest and political instability, politicians often resort to blaming universities for radicalizing those involved. From an academic perspective, research links the availability of higher education to increased levels of civic engagement (Glaeser et al., 2007; Hillygus, 2005; Verba et al., 1995), the circulation of new and potentially subversive ideas (Benavot, 1996), and the cultivation of alternative sets of elites (Hollenbach et al., 2020). In this way, higher education can challenge the status quo and even the state’s authority. Despite these threats, most countries around the world rapidly expanded access to higher education in the mid-twentieth century. This global transition from elite-only higher education to mass access to higher education (Trow, 2006) has gone largely unexplored, particularly in the political science literature. Thus, this research examines why, all of the sudden, access to higher education expanded across the globe in the mid-twentieth century. In particular, it assesses the plausibility of the “usual suspects” — democratization and economic development— to explain this change alongside less-common explanations such as security threats and diffusion. Leveraging a mixed-methods design, the paper examines cross-national associations between tertiary enrollment rates and theoretical drivers of higher education provision and further investigates these relationships with selected case studies.