College For Sale

Nasson College was a small, liberal arts college located in Springvale, Maine. Unfortunately, declining enrollment and questionable management decisions led to its bankruptcy and closing. But the path to closure had been set in motion many years before, long before the college filed for bankruptcy in November 1982. As it turned out, the end of Nasson College was not the end of Nasson's story. Author Richard E. Schneider tells the tale of how the community and alumni tried to save Nasson, which was in its time a beloved and respected school. College for Sale discusses how, as soon as the school closed, its corporate charter, the campus, the student records, and the outstanding multimillion-dollar trust fund that would eventually come due were in turmoil. It shares the details of the lawsuits, three bankruptcy auctions, loan defaults, federal investigations, congressional interventions, the school's reopening, and its subsequent closing. College for Sale shows how the Nasson alumni held together and, bit by bit, restored the Nasson Alumni Association to an active, vibrant organization, just as the old campus was revitalized with millions of dollars in new capital investments.

This text analyses higher education in the US and other western countries since the 1970s whereby market place logic has influenced the education system. It describes the transformation of US universities as they attempt to accommodate the changes on their own and their students' academic lives.

This text analyses higher education in the US and other western countries since the 1970s whereby market place logic has influenced the education system. It describes the transformation of US universities as they attempt to accommodate the changes on their own and their students' academic lives.

How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants. Students, administrators, and scholars have begun to think of themselves as economic actors rather than seekers of knowledge. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Busch urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies—market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty—break down. In this future, universities value learning and not training, scholarship grapples with society's most pressing problems rather than quick fixes for corporate interests, and democracy is enriched by its educated and engaged citizens.

This book aims to demonstrate how the invisible pressure from prominent corporations controls American society and the education system. The book was written in response to public comment by Dr Tildsley in May 1922 that schools are no longer run to the benefit of children. This statement is the book's thesis, which is informative and persuasive. It examines details of the schooling system, the curriculum and the politics surrounding schools in America.