In 1960 as a college freshman, he imported peace symbol buttons into the United States from Britain in 1960.

At SUNY Buffalo, he was an adjunct professor in the School of Information and Library Studies and the Department of Sociology.

In 1994, Altbach moved to the Boston College and founded the Center for International Higher Education, and soon became the J. Donald Monan SJ professor of higher education at Boston College, a position which he held until his retirement in 2013.

[2] Altbach has held additional academic appointments, including visiting associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley (1981), visiting professor in the School of Education and visiting senior scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (1988–1989), senior associate of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1992–1996), Fulbright research professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Bombay, India (1968), and senior Fulbright scholar in Singapore and Malaysia (1983).

[2] He has authored or edited more than 50 books on topics ranging from higher education to India’s publishing industry to student activism.