Since the creation of the first European universities in the Middle Ages, the instrumentation of access to Higher Education has been associated with civil, political and social citizenship differentiation. Still, research on Higher Education has largely let aside this dimension to mainly investigate the effect of cultural, social and economic resources. Sketching this articulation over the centuries this programmatic paper documents the reciprocal relation between access to Higher Education and citizenship, reflecting both its empirical and theoretical added value as it allows to connect different scales of analysis and offers insights on the role of Higher Education in the world historical development.