Download or read book The Lowering of Higher Education in America written by Jackson Toby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few in the United States will dispute the assumption that every high school graduate should be entitled to go to college regardless of financial need. But should everyone be able to go regardless of academic preparedness? Jackson Toby explores the idea that federal financial aid programs, all of which peg student aid to need alone and not to academic performance, are dragging down college admissions and academic standards to the point where America's schools, students, and economy will no longer be globally competitive. After a half-century of teaching, distinguished educator Jackson Toby concludes that our current system all too often gives both high school and college students the impression that college is an entitlement and not a challenge. The Lowering of Higher Education: Why Student Loans Should Be Based on Credit Worthiness is Toby's unflinching look at this broken system and the ways it can be fixed. This volume documents just how far college admission standards have fallen and measures the cost of remedial programs designed to get underprepared high school students to the level they should have been at in the first place. Toby is both pointed and frank in his discussion on the issue of grade inflation, which rewards laziness while demoralizing hard-working students. To reverse the national decline of academic standards in American colleges, Toby proposes a radical solution: Let federal student aid be tied to academic performance as well as financial need, incentivizing students to develop serious attitudes and study habits in high school and keep them up in college.
Download or read book Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free written by Robert Samuels and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Universities tend to be judged by the test scores of their incoming students and not on what students actually learn once they attend these institutions. While shared tests and surveys have been developed, most schools refuse to publish the results. Instead, they allow such publications as U.S. News & World Report to define educational quality. In order to raise their status in these rankings, institutions pour money into new facilities and extracurricular activities while underfunding their educational programs. In Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free, Robert Samuels argues that many institutions of higher education squander funds and mislead the public about such things as average class size, faculty-to-student ratios, number of faculty with PhDs, and other indicators of educational quality. Parents and students seem to have little knowledge of how colleges and universities have been restructured over the past thirty years. Samuels shows how research universities have begun to function as giant investment banks or hedge funds that spend money on athletics and administration while increasing tuition costs and actually lowering the quality of undergraduate education. In order to fight higher costs and lower quality, Samuels suggests, universities must reallocate these misused funds and concentrate on their core mission of instruction and related research. Throughout the book, Samuels argues that the future of our economy and democracy rests on our ability to train students to be thoughtful participants in the production and analysis of knowledge. If leading universities serve only to grant credentials and prestige, our society will suffer irrevocable harm. Presenting the problem of how universities make and spend money, Samuels provides solutions to make these important institutions less expensive and more vital. By using current resources in a more effective manner, we could even, he contends, make all public higher education free.
Download or read book American Higher Education in Decline written by Kenneth H. Ashworth and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last twenty years America's higher-education system has jeopardized our society's very future by allowing a serious decline in educational quality. Responding to modern egalitarianism and the need to attract students, colleges and universities have initiated wildly innovative programs, noncampuses, and nontraditional degrees. Worse, they have lowered all standards. Nonacademic entrepreneurs, attracted by generous federal funds, now demand equal status with established schools. And they are dangerously near receiving this full recognition from irresolute regional accrediting associations.
Download or read book Lowering Higher Education written by James Cote and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Restoring the Promise written by Richard K. Vedder and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American higher education is increasingly in trouble. Costs are too high, learning is too little, and underemployment abounds post-graduation. Universities are facing an uncertain and unsettling future with free speech suppression, out-of-control Federal student aid programs, soaring administrative costs, and intercollegiate athletics mired in corruption. Restoring the Promise explores these issues and exposes the federal government's role in contributing to them. With up-to-date discussions of the most recent developments on university campuses, this book is the most comprehensive assessment of universities in recent years, and one that decidedly rejects conventional wisdom. Restoring the Promise is an absolute must-read for those concerned with the future of higher education in America.
Download or read book The Lowering of Higher Education in America written by Jackson Toby and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A top educator looks at the causes and national costs of the lowering of college admission and academic standards in the United States, then proposes confronting the problem by tying federal student grants and loans to academic performance as well as to financial need. After a half-century of teaching, distinguished educator Jackson Toby concludes that all too often, our current system gives high school students the impression that college is an entitlement and not a challenge. The Lowering of Higher Education: Why Financial Aid Should be Based on Student Performance is Toby's unflinching look at this broken system and the ways it can be fixed. The Lowering of Higher Education documents just how far college admission standards have fallen, then measures the cost of remedial programs for underprepared high school students just to get them to where they should have been in the first place. Toby also pulls no punches on the issue of grade inflation, which rewards laziness while demoralizing hard-working students. In conclusion, Toby proposes an innovative solution: base financial aid solely on academic performance, creating a compelling incentive for students to develop serious attitudes and study approaches in high school.
Download or read book The Breakdown of Higher Education written by John M. Ellis and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Crisis in Higher Education written by Jeffrey R. Docking and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-02-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2005 Adrian College was home to 840 enrolled students and had a tuition income of $8.54 million. By fall of 2011, enrollment had soared to 1,688, and tuition income had increased to $20.45 million. For the first time in years, the small liberal arts college was financially viable. Adrian College experienced this remarkable growth during the worst American economy in seventy years and in a state ravaged by the decline of the big three auto companies. How, exactly, did this turnaround happen? Crisis in Higher Education: A Plan to Save Small Liberal Arts Colleges in America was written to facilitate replication and generalization of Adrian College’s tremendous enrollment growth and retention success since 2005. This book directly addresses the economic competitiveness of small four-year institutions of higher education and presents an evidence-based solution to the enrollment and economic crises faced by many small liberal arts colleges throughout the country.
Download or read book Failed Grade written by Albert H. Soloway and published by American University & College Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "corporatization" of colleges and universities has steered the attention of institutions to the "bottom line" rather than education of students. With the administration's priorities trained on the generation of money (through grants and contracts, patents, eminent publications or works of art, awards, patient care, student tuition or fundraising) what happens to the education of teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers and our future leaders?What can be done to return an institution to its primary mission that is, educating the next generation and in the process, creating new knowledge?Colleges and universities are beginning to lose their way and a wakeup call is clearly necessary. FAILED GRADE: The Corporatization and Decline of Higher Education in America, is that wakeup call.
Download or read book The Rise of Women written by Thomas A. DiPrete and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.
Download or read book Decline and Revival in Higher Education written by Herbert I. London and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an analysis of higher education in the past half century, a period of dramatic change and democratization. But it is more than that. The author has been a participant in the struggle to stem the decline in higher education, as it moved from an emphasis on classical liberal values toward relativism and ideological extremism. This volume reflects an awareness of what has been lost, but sees hope for a revival of traditional values as technological change and awareness of failure forces institutions to examine their premise. Herbert I. London has provided here fuel for fundamental redirection in American college and university affairs. Decline and Revival in Higher Education is uncompromising in its concerns, but points the way toward a future linked to the best of the past. The work follows the personal evolution of the author, while at the same time, describes the devolution of university standards in such institutions as Columbia, Duke, the University of California at Berkeley, and New York University. While seeing optimistic trends in oases of traditional programming that can serve as a counterweight to campus orthodoxies, London argues that the dramatic transformation of the academy cannot be denied. The social sciences and humanities in particular have become isolated from mainstream requirements in the nation. London deals with concrete concerns, such as the collapse of classic book programs in the contemporary curriculum, the decline and even vigilante raids on opposition in campus publications, the collapse of moral judgment in favor of pure relativism, the transformation of many museums into a storage houses of debris, and the confusion of coarse language with democratization. These developments lead the author to write this book, for if the culture wars are over, the American people may be the losers.
Download or read book Higher Education in America written by Derek Bok and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-22 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping assessment of the state of higher education today from former Harvard president Derek Bok Higher Education in America is a landmark work--a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the current condition of our colleges and universities from former Harvard president Derek Bok, one of the nation's most respected education experts. Sweepingly ambitious in scope, this is a deeply informed and balanced assessment of the many strengths as well as the weaknesses of American higher education today. At a time when colleges and universities have never been more important to the lives and opportunities of students or to the progress and prosperity of the nation, Bok provides a thorough examination of the entire system, public and private, from community colleges and small liberal arts colleges to great universities with their research programs and their medical, law, and business schools. Drawing on the most reliable studies and data, he determines which criticisms of higher education are unfounded or exaggerated, which are issues of genuine concern, and what can be done to improve matters. Some of the subjects considered are long-standing, such as debates over the undergraduate curriculum and concerns over rising college costs. Others are more recent, such as the rise of for-profit institutions and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Additional topics include the quality of undergraduate education, the stagnating levels of college graduation, the problems of university governance, the strengths and weaknesses of graduate and professional education, the environment for research, and the benefits and drawbacks of the pervasive competition among American colleges and universities. Offering a rare survey and evaluation of American higher education as a whole, this book provides a solid basis for a fresh public discussion about what the system is doing right, what it needs to do better, and how the next quarter century could be made a period of progress rather than decline.
Download or read book The Great Mistake written by Christopher Newfield and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful, hopeful critique of the unnecessary death spiral of higher education, The Great Mistake is essential reading for those who wonder why students have been paying more to get less and for everyone who cares about the role the higher education system plays in improving the lives of average Americans.
Download or read book The Great Upheaval written by Arthur Levine and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How will America's colleges and universities adapt to remarkable technological, economic, and demographic change? The United States is in the midst of a profound transformation the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Industrial Revolution, when America's classical colleges adapted to meet the needs of an emerging industrial economy. Today, as the world shifts to an increasingly interconnected knowledge economy, the intersecting forces of technological innovation, globalization, and demographic change create vast new challenges, opportunities, and uncertainties. In this great upheaval, the nation's most enduring social institutions are at a crossroads. In The Great Upheaval, Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt examine higher and postsecondary education to see how it has changed to become what it is today—and how it might be refitted for an uncertain future. Taking a unique historical, cross-industry perspective, Levine and Van Pelt perform a 360-degree survey of American higher education. Combining historical, trend, and comparative analyses of other business sectors, they ask • how much will colleges and universities change, what will change, and how will these changes occur? • will institutions of higher learning be able to adapt to the challenges they face, or will they be disrupted by them? • will the industrial model of higher education be repaired or replaced? • why is higher education more important than ever? The book is neither an attempt to advocate for a particular future direction nor a warning about that future. Rather, it looks objectively at the contexts in which higher education has operated—and will continue to operate. It also seeks to identify likely developments that will aid those involved in steering higher education forward, as well as the many millions of Americans who have a stake in its future. Concluding with a detailed agenda for action, The Great Upheaval is aimed at policy makers, college administrators, faculty, trustees, and students, as well as general readers and people who work for nonprofits facing the same big changes.
Download or read book Paying the Price written by Sara Goldrick-Rab and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “bracing and well-argued” study of America’s college debt crisis—“necessary reading for anyone concerned about the fate of American higher education” (Kirkus). College is far too expensive for many people today, and the confusing mix of federal, state, institutional, and private financial aid leaves countless students without the resources they need to pay for it. In Paying the Price, education scholar Sara Goldrick-Rab reveals the devastating effect of these shortfalls. Goldrick-Rab examines a study of 3,000 students who used the support of federal aid and Pell Grants to enroll in public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008. Half the students in the study left college without a degree, while less than 20 percent finished within five years. The cause of their problems, time and again, was lack of money. Unable to afford tuition, books, and living expenses, they worked too many hours at outside jobs, dropped classes, took time off to save money, and even went without adequate food or housing. In many heartbreaking cases, they simply left school—not with a degree, but with crippling debt. Goldrick-Rab combines that data with devastating stories of six individual students, whose struggles make clear the human and financial costs of our convoluted financial aid policies. In the final section of the book, Goldrick-Rab offers a range of possible solutions, from technical improvements to the financial aid application process, to a bold, public sector–focused “first degree free” program. "Honestly one of the most exciting books I've read, because [Goldrick-Rab has] solutions. It's a manual that I'd recommend to anyone out there, if you're a parent, if you're a teacher, if you're a student."—Trevor Noah, The Daily Show
Download or read book American Higher Education in Crisis written by Goldie Blumenstyk and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disinvestment by states has driven up tuition prices, and student debt has reached an all-time high. Americans are questioning the worth of a college education, even as studies show how important it is to economic and social mobility
Download or read book How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education written by Jeffrey R. Brown and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent financial crisis had a profound effect on both public and private universities. Universities responded to these stresses in different ways. This volume presents new evidence on the nature of these responses and how the incentives and constraints facing different institutions affected their behavior.
