A Higher Education

What happens to the liberal arts and science education when universities attempt to sell it as a form of job training? In Lowering Higher Education, a follow-up to their provocative 2007 book Ivory Tower Blues, James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar explore the subverted 'idea of the university' and the forces that have set adrift the mission of these institutions. Côté and Allahar connect the corporatization of universities to a range of contentious issues within higher education, from lowered standards and inflated grades to the overall decline of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences instruction. Lowering Higher Education points to a fundamental disconnect between policymakers, who may rarely set foot in contemporary classrooms, and the teachers who must implement their educational policies—which the authors argue are poorly informed—on a daily basis. Côté and Allahar expose stakeholder misconceptions surrounding the current culture of academic disengagement and supposed power of new technologies to motivate students. While outlining what makes the status quo dysfunctional, Lowering Higher Education also offers recommendations that have the potential to reinvigorate liberal education.

Perennial conclusions from state-by-state funding-per-student analyses of underfunding and weak state commitment have become so common that they have diluted the potency of the argument to state policymakers for more higher education funding. In addition, there has been little in the way of testing or questioning the assumptions embedded in traditional funding per student analysis and its accompanying conclusions.As state legislators balance the competing needs of education, health, transportation, and public safety budgets, they increasingly ask what return on investment (ROI) they get for the funding they provide, including from higher education. The ROI language, while potentially unsettling for its corporate-like and neoliberal connotation, will persist into the foreseeable future. We must ask questions both of adequacy (How much funding should the states provide?) and benefit (What benefits do states receive for the higher education funding they provide?). The focus on traditional funding per student analysis has remained static for over forty years, indicating the need for new ideas and methods to probe questions of adequacy and benefit.The Science of Higher Education is an introduction to a new paradigm that explores state higher education funding, enrollment, completion, and supply (the number and type of institutions in a state) through the lens of what are commonly known as power laws. Power laws explain patterns in biological systems and characteristics of cities. Like cities, state higher education systems are complex adaptive systems, so it is little surprise that power laws also explain funding, enrollment, completion, and supply.The scale relationships uncovered in the Science of Higher Education suggest the potential benefits state policymakers could derive by emphasizing enrollment, completion, or capacity policies, based on economies of scale, marginal benefits, and the return state’s get on enrollment and completion for the funding they provide.The various features of state higher education systems that conform to scale patterns do not alone provide definitive answers for appropriate funding levels, however. As this book addresses, policymakers need to take into account the macro forces, from demography to geography and the economy, that situate the system, as well the interactions between government and market actors that are at the core of every state higher education system and influence the outcomes it achieves.

"The economics of American higher education are driven by one key factor--the availability of students willing to pay tuition--and many related factors that determine what schools they attend. By digging into the data, economist Nathan Grawe has created probability models for predicting college attendance. What he sees are alarming events on the horizon that every college and university needs to understand. Overall, he spots demographic patterns that are tilting the US population toward the Hispanic southwest. Moreover, since 2007, fertility rates have fallen by 12 percent. Higher education analysts recognize the destabilizing potential of these trends. However, existing work fails to adjust headcounts for college attendance probabilities and makes no systematic attempt to distinguish demand by institution type. This book analyzes demand forecasts by institution type and rank, disaggregating by demographic groups. Its findings often contradict the dominant narrative: while many schools face painful contractions, demand for elite schools is expected to grow by 15+ percent. Geographic and racial profiles will shift only slightly--and attendance by Asians, not Hispanics, will grow most. Grawe also use the model to consider possible changes in institutional recruitment strategies and government policies. These "what if" analyses show that even aggressive innovation is unlikely to overcome trends toward larger gaps across racial, family income, and parent education groups. Aimed at administrators and trustees with responsibility for decisions ranging from admissions to student support to tenure practices to facilities construction, this book offers data to inform decision-making--decisions that will determine institutional success in meeting demographic challenges"--

A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis. Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a plan first devised by a small group of activists to use college campuses to promote radical politics, and why laws and regulations designed to prevent the politicizing of higher education proved insufficient. Ellis shows that political motivation is always destructive of higher learning. Even science and technology departments are not immune. The corruption of universities by radical politics also does wider damage: to primary and secondary education, to race relations, to preparation for the workplace, and to the political and social fabric of the nation. Commonly suggested remedies—new free-speech rules, or enforced right-of-center appointments—will fail because they don’t touch the core problem, a controlling faculty majority of political activists with no real interest in scholarship. This book proposes more drastic and effective reform measures. The first step is for Americans to recognize that vast sums of public money intended for education are being diverted to a political agenda, and to demand that this fraud be stopped.

Academics extol high-minded ideals, such as serving the common good and promoting social justice. Universities aim to be centers of learning that find the best and brightest students, treat them fairly, and equip them with the knowledge they need to lead better lives. But as Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness show in Cracks in the Ivory Tower, American universities fall far short of this ideal. At almost every level, they find that students, professors, and administrators are guided by self-interest rather than ethical concerns. College bureaucratic structures also often incentivize and reward bad behavior, while disincentivizing and even punishing good behavior. Most students, faculty, and administrators are out to serve themselves and pass their costs onto others. The problems are deep and pervasive: most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent. To justify their own pay raises and higher budgets, administrators hire expensive and unnecessary staff. Faculty exploit students for tuition dollars through gen-ed requirements. Students hardly learn anything and cheating is pervasive. At every level, academics disguise their pursuit of self-interest with high-faluting moral language. Marshaling an array of data, Brennan and Magness expose many of the ethical failings of academia and in turn reshape our understanding of how such high power institutions run their business. Everyone knows academia is dysfunctional. Brennan and Magness show the problems are worse than anyone realized. Academics have only themselves to blame.

A report from the front lines of higher education and technology that chronicles efforts to transform teaching, learning, and opportunity. Colleges and universities have become increasingly costly, and, except for a handful of highly selective, elite institutions, unresponsive to twenty-first-century needs. But for the past few years, technology-fueled innovation has begun to transform higher education, introducing new ways to disseminate knowledge and better ways to learn—all at lower cost. In this impassioned account, Richard DeMillo tells the behind-the-scenes story of these pioneering efforts and offers a roadmap for transforming higher education. Building on his earlier book, Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that the current system of higher education is clearly unsustainable. Colleges and universities are in financial crisis. Tuition rises inexorably. Graduates of reputable schools often fail to learn basic skills, and many cannot find suitable jobs. Meanwhile, student-loan default rates have soared while the elite Ivy and near-Ivy schools seem remote and irrelevant. Where are the revolutionaries who can save higher education? DeMillo's heroes are a small band of innovators who are bringing the revolution in technology to colleges and universities. DeMillo chronicles, among other things, the invention of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) by professors at Stanford and MIT; Salman Khan's Khan Academy; the use of technology by struggling historically black colleges and universities to make learning more accessible; and the latest research on learning and the brain. He describes the revolution's goals and the entrenched hierarchical system it aims to overthrow; and he reframes the nature of the contract between society and its universities. The new institutions of a transformed higher education promise to demonstrate not only that education has value but also that it has values—virtues for the common good.

Tierney, University of Southern California; and the late J. Douglas Toma, University of Georgia