Links between entrepreneurialism and higher education have a long history, although their existence has not always been acknowledged. In consequence higher education in the United Kingdom and in the United States has been subject to market forces, both from clients in external markets and sponsors and financiers in the internal market. From the 1850s onwards, this resulted in the development of an entrepreneurial system of higher education in the United States, where from the 1950s, even small colleges began to seek a national, or even international market, marking a move towards the eventual globalisation of US higher education. In the 1980s a Conservative government introduced an entrepreneurial system into the United Kingdom, but rapidly, by legislation, rather than gradually, by symbiosis. The UK system expanded substantially, with many non-university institutions, previously under the boort-main' control of Local Government, receiving their freedom as higher education corporations. Seeking prestige and security in size, many of these began to operate in an inadequately regulated global market. To meet the changed circumstances, trustees and governors tended to recruit a new type of college manager and in many institutions the entrepreneurial economocracy supplanted the academic oligarchy. Parsons College, Iowa, in the 1960s, Upper Iowa University in the 1970s and Southampton Institute, England, in the late 1980s, were all led down an entrepreneurial path by a dominant individual, with varying results. In each case the burden of history, whether of the institution, its sponsors, or the milieu in which it was to operate, exercised a significant influence on the outcome of the entrepreneurial activity, with failure sometimes appearing to have been inevitable A major theme is the extent to which prior events can influence and even determine the trajectory taken by an institution and its personnel, and the thesis examines the history and circumstances in which the current systems of entrepreneurial higher education developed, in part as a result of the social, economic and cultural benefits it can bring to a locality. By reference to the three institutions, the thesis seeks to identify some Anglo-American parallels, the tensions which can arise, and the factors which determine success or failure within the academy and the educational market-place. It also seeks to gain some insight with regard to the effect entrepreneurialism in the academy has on the student, whose role as a learner may be overshadowed and obscured by the role of consumer. Scope for future research is also indicated.