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Colleges and universities were once places where students came to learn, experts, intellectuals, and others came to teach, and where knowledge was created. Today, America's higher education system is severely compromised by commodification and corporatization, which have transformed higher education into a marketplace. This book examines the effects of these transformations, providing a comprehensive critique of the problems the sector faces. It outlines how higher education's commodification has impacted areas including affordability, access, waste, hierarchal administrative structures, faculty governance, the college sports industrial complex, and status and social mobility based on institutional prestige. The authors explore alternative policy solutions and examples of systems of higher education that are both effective and cost-effective. They propose a forward-looking agenda for structural reform that is less expensive and more educationally sound than the current model. Emphasising social cohesion, sustainability, a respect for diversity and an understanding of democracy and democratic principles, Failing Universities offers alternative solutions for US higher education to return to its basic mission.
The cost of a college degree has increased by 1,125% since 1978—four times the rate of inflation. Total student debt has surpassed $1.3 trillion. Nearly two thirds of all college students must borrow to study, and the average student graduates with more than $30,000 in debt. Many college graduates under twenty-five years old are unemployed or underemployed. And professors—remember them?—rarely teach undergraduates at many major universities, instead handing off their lecture halls to cheaper teaching assistants. So, is it worth it? That’s the question Charles J. Sykes attempts to answer in Fail U., exploring the staggering costs of a college education, the sharp decline in tenured faculty and teaching loads, the explosion of administrative jobs, the grandiose building plans, and the utter lack of preparedness for the real world that many now graduates face. Fail U. offers a different vision of higher education; one that is affordable, more productive, and better-suited to meet the needs of a diverse range of students—and one that will actually be useful in their future careers and lives.
An NPR Favorite Book of the Year “Breaks new ground on social and educational questions of great import.” —Washington Post “An essential work, humane and candid, that challenges and expands our understanding of the lives of contemporary college students.” —Paul Tough, author of Helping Children Succeed “Eye-opening...Brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions.” —Washington Post “Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion...His book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.” —New Yorker The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others.
“An essential title for anyone thinking of law school or concerned with America's dysfunctional legal system.” —Library Journal On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise and law professors are among the highest paid. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession. Addressing all these problems and more is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades. Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha provides the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them. “Failing Law Schools presents a comprehensive case for the negative side of the legal education debate and I am sure that many legal academics and every law school dean will be talking about it.” —Stanley Fish, Florida International University College of Law
Introduction -- American dreams : access, mobility, fairness -- Free minds : educating democratic citizens -- Hard facts : knowledge creation and checking power -- Purposeful pluralism : dialogue across difference on campus -- Conclusion.
For hundreds of years, knowledge has been central in understanding the university. Over recent decades, however, it is the economic value of knowledge that has come to the fore. Now, in a post-truth world, knowledge is also treated with suspicion and has become a vehicle for ideologies. Knowledge and the University combats all these ways of thinking. Its central claim is that knowledge is of value because of its connection with life. Knowledge is of life, from life, in life and for life. With an engaging philosophical discussion, and with a consideration of the evolution of higher education institutions, this book: Examines ways in which research, teaching and learning are bound up with life; Looks to breathe new life into the university itself; Widens the idea of the knowledge ecology to embrace the whole world; Suggests new roles for the university towards culture and the public sphere. Knowledge and the University is a radical text that looks to engender nothing less than a new spirit of the university. It offers a fascinating read for policy makers, institutional leaders, academics and all interested in the future of universities.
This book looks at the progress of American education in the use of technology since the publication of Stallard and Cocker's last book, The Promise of Technology in Schools: The Next Twenty Years. Fifteen years after its publication, they find little significant difference in the way K-12 schools are using technology to improve student achievement. Education Technology and the Failure of American Schools offers a broad and penetrating look at the American educational system to determine why progress is so lacking. What is found is a system that has far outlived its functionality in terms of governance, organization, and professional practices. American schools are compared to those of nations whose students regularly outperform them on international tests of achievement. The authors offer a bold approach to educational reform that will irritate many who now consider themselves educational leaders. The final chapter makes offers a new approach to education in the primary grades, one that will surprise those lobbying for more computers for those early learning years. This is a must-read for anyone concerned about American education. The contributors of this book: Offer clear examples of what is missing in the average school experience Explain why teaching and school administration are not true professions Discuss levels of failure from the federal level to the local school administration Describe how the present system came into being Compare educational reform efforts with those in actual professions Explain the basic misapplication of technology in the present system
The University of East Anglia at Norwich was one of a number of new universities founded in Britain in the 1960s in response to the need to increase the provision for higher education. Remarkable for its architecture, primarily by Denys Lasdun, and for its superb Sainsbury Art Collection, its history is a telling commentary on the opportunities and problems faced by British universities over the last forty years. The History of the University of East Anglia Norwich is a full account of UEA's foundation, growth and distinctive character. Michael Sanderson highlights both the university's successes and failures, at the same time painting a picture of life, teaching and research on the campus. By examining the real problems faced by a leading British university, he has provided an important contribution to British educational history.
This book sheds light on the risk of losing the authoritative knowledge discovered and taught by public universities. It argues that public universities are as indispensable now, as never before, for providing governments and citizens with reliable knowledge crucial for confronting the looming environmental, cultural, economic, and political challenges now threatening humanity’s very existence. Acknowledging the history of universities around the world, the book highlights the role they have played in creating and curating knowledge. It examines John Henry Newman’s liberal idea of the university and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s conception of the institution and argues this is all under threat at the hands of fake prophets and biased media preaching "alternative facts" and populist falsehoods. Shedding light on neoliberalism and the tensions between research, education, and training, the author demonstrates that the best pedagogical and economic outcomes are achieved when these interests are dynamically informing each other. This book will be of interest to academics, university managers, and higher education policymakers questioning the role, value, and purpose of the contemporary public university.
In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual, institutional, and political history to reinterpret postwar American life through the changes in higher education. Acknowledging but rejecting the prevailing conception of the Cold War university largely dedicated to supporting national security, Schrum provides a more complete and contextualized account of the American research university between 1945 and 1970. Uncovering a pervasive instrumental understanding of higher education during that era, The Instrumental University shows that universities framed their mission around solving social problems and promoting economic development as central institutions in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. In so doing, these institutions took on more capitalistic and managerial tendencies and, as a result, marginalized founding ideals, such as pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and freedom of individual investigators. The technocratic turn eroded some practices that made the American university special. Yet, as Schrum suggests, the instrumental university was not yet the neoliberal university of the 1970s and onwards in which market considerations trumped all others. University of California president Clark Kerr and other innovators in higher education were driven by a progressive impulse that drew on an earlier tradition grounded in a concern for the common good and social welfare.