front cover of Economic Challenges in Higher Education
Economic Challenges in Higher Education
Charles T. Clotfelter, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Malcolm Getz, and John J. Siegfried
University of Chicago Press, 1991
The last two decades have been a turbulent period for American higher education, with profound demographic shifts, gyrating salaries, and marked changes in the economy. While enrollments rose about 50% in that period, sharp increases in tuition and fees at colleges and universities provoke accusations of inefficiency, even outright institutional greed and irresponsibility. As the 1990s progress, surpluses in the academic labor supply may give way to shortages in many fields, but will there be enough new Ph.D.'s to go around?

Drawing on the authors' experience as economists and educators, this book offers an accessible analysis of three crucial economic issues: the growth and composition of undergraduate enrollments, the supply of faculty in the academic labor market, and the cost of operating colleges and universities. The study provides valuable insights for administrators and scholars of education.
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Economic Inequality and Higher Education
Access, Persistence, and Success
Stacy Dickert-Conlin
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
The vast disparities in college attendance and graduation rates between students from different class backgrounds is a growing social concern. Economic Inequality and Higher Education investigates the connection between income inequality and unequal access to higher education, and proposes solutions that the state and federal governments and schools themselves can undertake to make college accessible to students from all backgrounds. Economic Inequality and Higher Education convenes experts from the fields of education, economics, and public policy to assess the barriers that prevent low-income students from completing college. For many students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, the challenge isn't getting into college, but getting out with a degree. Helping this group will require improving the quality of education in the community colleges and lower-tier public universities they are most likely to attend. Documenting the extensive disjuncture between the content of state-mandated high school testing and college placement exams, Michael Kirst calls for greater alignment between K-12 and college education. Amanda Pallais and Sarah Turner examine barriers to access at elite universities for low-income students—including tuition costs, lack of information, and poor high school records—as well as recent initiatives to increase socioeconomic diversity at private and public universities. Top private universities have increased the level and transparency of financial aid, while elite public universities have focused on outreach, mentoring, and counseling, and both sets of reforms show signs of success. Ron Ehrenberg notes that financial aid policies in both public and private universities have recently shifted towards merit-based aid, away from the need-based aid that is most helpful to low-income students. Ehrenberg calls on government policy makers to create incentives for colleges to increase their representation of low-income students. Higher education is often vaunted as the primary engine of upward mobility. Instead, as inequality in America rises, colleges may be reproducing income disparities from one generation to the next. Economic Inequality and Higher Education illuminates this worrisome trend and suggests reforms that educational institutions and the government must implement to make the dream of a college degree a reality for all motivated students.
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The Educated Underclass
Students and the False Promise of Social Mobility
Gary Roth
Pluto Press, 2019
"The waste of human capacity Roth describes is phenomenal. But his major point is that it is not new. The millennials are feeling the worst of it, perhaps, but only the worst so far."—Inside High Ed
 
The dream of social mobility is dying. Where previous generations routinely expected to surpass their parents' level of economic success, prospects for today's young people are increasingly bleak.  What role does higher education play in the process? An essential and frightening one, according to author Gary Roth.           
 
The Educated Underclass reveals the structural problems that are helping to create this problem. Gary Roth shows how universities—touted as the best way up the economic ladder for young people—actually reproduce traditional class hierarchies. And as more graduates emerge every year into economies that are no longer creating a steady stream of stable jobs, the odds of landing one decrease—and over-educated people end up scrapping for poorly compensated positions for which they're overqualified. Chapters include:
 
*Higher education and class
*The overproduction of intelligence
*Class in transition: historical background
*Underemployment through the decades
*Class status and economic instability
*And more!
 
Roth writes in his Introduction, “Education has become an intermediary institution between a social system that habitually sputters and declines while ever-greater amounts of consumer products are dangled in front of the system’s workforce. The result: a dynamic fraught with all sort of negative possibilities, both socially and psychotically.” 
 
A broadside against the failures of our education system and our economy, Gary Roth’s The Educated Underclass aims to startle us out of our complacency and wake us up to action.  
 
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front cover of Educating for Wisdom in the 21st Century
Educating for Wisdom in the 21st Century
Darin H. Davis
St. Augustine's Press, 2019
Contemporary higher education is in the midst of undeniable challenge and transformation. The cost of a college degree continues to increase by leaps and bounds as many students and their parents assume enormous student loan debt. Sweeping technological change, especially online instruction, is now forcing colleges and universities to re-envision how course content can be offered. Moreover, it is not clear what people expect colleges and universities to do in the first place. Should they be primarily devoted to preparing their graduates to enter the workforce? Should they at the same time advance innovative research across the disciplines in ways that expand the frontiers of knowledge? Should they seek to form their students intellectually, morally, and even spiritually, while preparing them for responsible citizenship and civic engagement? Should they also be the places where enthusiastic sports fans gather in grand arenas and stadiums to watch athletes pursue victory? A generation ago it was generally believed that the essential purpose of a university education was educating for wisdom — shaping the moral and intellectual character of students in ways that led them to live and do well over their entire lives. Although the mission statements and curricula of many small, private liberal arts colleges and even large state-supported universities still echo this commitment, it is by no means the defining mark of present day higher education. The contributors to this volume — which include some of the most thoughtful critics of the modern academy —contend that seeking, teaching, and cultivating wisdom remains the fundamental aim of university education. Neither lamenting the current state of affairs nor waxing nostalgic for bygone days, the authors in this volume reflect upon the nature of wisdom, its sources, and how it again might animate teaching and learning in 21st century. With essays from Anthony Kronman, Andrew Delbanco, Darin Davis, Celia Deane-Drummond, John Haldane, and Walter Brueggemann, this volume brings together a distinguished and diverse group of voices to consider this timely and important topic.
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Educating the New Southern Woman
Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women's Colleges, 1884-1945
David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, a network of public colleges for white women flourished throughout the South. Founded primarily as vocational colleges to educate women of modest economic means for life in the emerging “new” South, these schools soon transformed themselves into comprehensive liberal arts–industrial institutions, proving so popular that they became among the largest women’s colleges in the nation. In this illuminating volume, David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs examine rhetorical education at all eight of these colleges, providing a better understanding of not only how women learned to read, write, and speak in American colleges but also how they used their education in their lives beyond college.

With a collective enrollment and impact rivaling that of the Seven Sisters, the schools examined in this study—Mississippi State College for Women (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), North Carolina College for Women (1891), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), Alabama College for Women (1896), Texas State College for Women (1901), Florida State College for Women (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908)—served as important centers of women’s education in their states, together educating over a hundred thousand students before World War II and contributing to an emerging professional class of women in the South. After tracing the establishment and evolution of these institutions, Gold and Hobbs explore education in speech arts and public speaking at the colleges and discuss writing instruction, setting faculty and departmental goals and methods against larger institutional, professional, and cultural contexts. In addition to covering the various ways the public women’s colleges prepared women to succeed in available occupations, the authors also consider how women’s education in rhetoric and writing affected their career choices, the role of race at these schools, and the legacy of public women’s colleges in relation to the history of women’s education and contemporary challenges in the teaching of rhetoric and writing.

The experiences of students and educators at these institutions speak to important conversations among scholars in rhetoric, education, women’s studies, and history. By examining these previously unexplored but important institutional sites, Educating the New Southern Woman provides a richer and more complex history of women’s rhetorical education and experiences.

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Educating the Sons of Sugar
Jefferson College and the Creole Planter Class of South Louisiana
R. Eric Platt
University of Alabama Press, 2017
A study of Louisiana French Creole sugar planters’ role in higher education and a detailed history of the only college ever constructed to serve the sugar elite

The education of individual planter classes—cotton, tobacco, sugar—is rarely treated in works of southern history. Of the existing literature, higher education is typically relegated to a footnote, providing only brief glimpses into a complex instructional regime responsive to wealthy planters. R. Eric Platt’s Educating the Sons of Sugar allows for a greater focus on the mindset of French Creole sugar planters and provides a comprehensive record and analysis of a private college supported by planter wealth.
 
Jefferson College was founded in St. James Parish in 1831, surrounded by slave-holding plantations and their cash crop, sugar cane. Creole planters (regionally known as the “ancienne population”) designed the college to impart a “genteel” liberal arts education through instruction, architecture, and geographic location. Jefferson College played host to social class rivalries (Creole, Anglo-American, and French immigrant), mirrored the revival of Catholicism in a region typified by secular mores, was subject to the “Americanization” of south Louisiana higher education, and reflected the ancienne population’s decline as Louisiana’s ruling population.
 
Resulting from loss of funds, the college closed in 1848. It opened and closed three more times under varying administrations (French immigrant, private sugar planter, and Catholic/Marist) before its final closure in 1927 due to educational competition, curricular intransigence, and the 1927 Mississippi River flood. In 1931, the campus was purchased by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and reopened as a silent religious retreat. It continues to function to this day as the Manresa House of Retreats. While in existence, Jefferson College was a social thermometer for the white French Creole sugar planter ethos that instilled the “sons of sugar” with a cultural heritage resonant of a region typified by the management of plantations, slavery, and the production of sugar.
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front cover of Engaging Place, Engaging Practices
Engaging Place, Engaging Practices
Urban History and Campus-Community Partnerships
Edited by Robin F. Bachin and Amy L. Howard
Temple University Press, 2023

Colleges and universities in urban centers have often leveraged their locales to appeal to students while also taking a more active role in addressing local challenges. They embrace civic engagement, support service-learning, tailor courses to local needs, and even provide university-community collaborations such as lab schools and innovation hubs. Engaging Place, Engaging Practices highlights the significant role the academy, in general, and urban history, in particular, can play in fostering these critical connections.

The editors and contributors to this volume address topics ranging from historical injustices and affordable housing and land use to climate change planning and the emergence of digital humanities. These case studies reveal the intricate components of a city’s history and how they provide context and promote a sense of cultural belonging.

This timely book appreciates and emphasizes the critical role universities must play as intentional—and humble—partners in addressing the past, present, and future challenges facing cities through democratic community engagement.

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front cover of Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century
Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century
Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model
Kezar, Adrianna
Rutgers University Press, 2016
The institution of tenure—once a cornerstone of American colleges and universities—is rapidly eroding. Today, the majority of faculty positions are part-time or limited-term appointments, a radical change that has resulted more from circumstance than from thoughtful planning. As colleges and universities evolve to meet the changing demands of society, how might their leaders design viable alternative faculty models for the future? 
 
Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century weighs the concerns of university administrators, professors, adjuncts, and students in order to critically assess emerging faculty models and offer informed policy recommendations. Cognizant of the financial pressures that have led many universities to favor short-term faculty contracts, higher education experts Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey assemble a top-notch roster of contributors to  investigate whether there are ways to modify the existing system or promote new faculty models. They suggest how colleges and universities might rethink their procedures for faculty development, hiring, scheduling, and evaluation in order to maintain a campus environment that still fosters faculty service and student-centered learning. 
 
Even as it asks urgent questions about how to retain the best elements of American higher education, Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century also examines the opportunities that systemic changes might create. Ultimately, it provides some starting points for how colleges and universities might best respond to the rapidly evolving needs of an increasingly global society.  
 
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front cover of Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education
Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education
Strategies for Teaching
Edited by Rita Kumar and Brenda Refaei
University of Cincinnati Press, 2020

Americans’ perception of college students does not correlate with the reality of the rich diversity seen on university campuses. Over 60% of Americans believe the average age of a college student is 20 years old but, in fact, it’s 26.4 years old. Demographics in the classroom are shifting and instructors bear a responsibility to adjust their teaching style and curriculum to be inclusive for all students.

Equity and Inclusion for Higher Education Strategies for Teaching, edited by Rita Kumar and Brenda Refaei, details the necessity for an inclusive curriculum with examples of discipline-specific activities and modules. The intersectionality of race, age, socioeconomic status, and ability all embody the diversity college instructors encounter in their classrooms. Through the chapters in this book, the contributors make apparent the "hidden curriculum," which is taught implicitly instead of explicitly. The editors focus on learner-centered environments and accessibility of classroom materials for traditionally marginalized students; a critical part of the labor needed to create an inclusive curriculum.

This text provides instructors with resources to create equity-based learning environments. It challenges instructors to see beyond Eurocentric curriculums and expand their pedagogy to include intercultural competence. The contributors challenge the student/instructor dichotomy and embrace collaboration between the two to construct a curriculum that fits all students' needs. The resources and examples in this book demonstrate the importance of inclusion and equity in the classroom. A companion community page provides examples and tools from the editors and contributing authors, which allows for readers to add materials from their own classrooms. This book and collaborative toolkit allow instructors to begin intentional practice of an inclusive curriculum and implement changes to promote respect for diversity.

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front cover of Exchange of Ideas
Exchange of Ideas
The Economy of Higher Education in Early America
Adam R. Nelson
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The first volume of an ambitious new economic history of American higher education.

Exchange of Ideas launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. In this volume, Adam R. Nelson focuses on the early republic, explaining how knowledge itself became a commodity, as useful ideas became salable goods and American colleges were drawn into transatlantic commercial relations. American scholars might once have imagined that higher education could sit beyond the sphere of market activity—that intellectual exchange could transcend vulgar consumerism—but already by the end of the eighteenth century, they saw how ideas could be factored into the nation’s balance of trade. Moreover, they concluded that it was the function of colleges to oversee the complex process whereby knowledge could be priced and purchased. The history of capitalism and the history of higher education, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important and strikingly urgent questions. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education in a capitalist democracy?
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