05/01/2017
This fresh and enlightening work from Labaree (Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling), a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, describes higher education in America as a consumer-driven, adaptable, stratified, expensive, and successful system. “I could easily write this book as a critique,” he notes, “focusing on the system’s failings, but instead I choose to write it as an appreciation, examining the distinctive institutional dynamics that enable it to be all things to all people.” The book includes a chronological overview of how higher education in the United States grew from a few old private colleges to a bonanza of universities, and an analysis of how the system has so successfully straddled public and private funding and governance, research and teaching priorities, and liberal and vocational aims. Labaree argues that the system both furthers social stratification and gives students real access to opportunity—but only if they can overcome the many barriers to completing a four-year degree. He explains why campus buildings often look like medieval cathedrals, how athletics are inextricable from the college degree, and why, “in order to become an academic powerhouse, the university also had to become a party school.” Labaree’s provocative view of higher education as a dysfunctional thing of beauty is likely to make anyone working in the field more than a little uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the book is chock-full of aha moments, and contributes an uncommon view to the larger discussion. (Mar.)
Read the news about America's colleges and universities-rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators-and it's clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree reminds us in this book, it's always been that way. And that's exactly why it has become the most successful and sought-after source of learning in the world. Detailing American higher education's unusual struggle for survival in a free market that never guaranteed its place in society-a fact that seemed to doom it in its early days in the nineteenth century-he tells a lively story of the entrepreneurial spirit that drove American higher education to become the best.
And the best it is: today America's universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world. But this was not an inevitability. Weakly funded by the state, American schools in their early years had to rely on student tuition and alumni donations in order to survive. As Labaree shows, by striving as much as possible to meet social needs and fulfill individual ambitions, they developed a broad base of political and financial support that, grounded by large undergraduate programs, allowed for the most cutting-edge research and advanced graduate study ever conducted. As a result, American higher education eventually managed to combine a unique mix of the populist, the practical, and the elite in a single complex system.
The answers to today's problems in higher education are not easy, but as this book shows, they shouldn't be: no single person or institution can determine higher education's future. It is something that faculty, administrators, and students-adapting to society's needs-will determine together, just as they have always done.
Read the news about America's colleges and universities-rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators-and it's clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree reminds us in this book, it's always been that way. And that's exactly why it has become the most successful and sought-after source of learning in the world. Detailing American higher education's unusual struggle for survival in a free market that never guaranteed its place in society-a fact that seemed to doom it in its early days in the nineteenth century-he tells a lively story of the entrepreneurial spirit that drove American higher education to become the best.
And the best it is: today America's universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world. But this was not an inevitability. Weakly funded by the state, American schools in their early years had to rely on student tuition and alumni donations in order to survive. As Labaree shows, by striving as much as possible to meet social needs and fulfill individual ambitions, they developed a broad base of political and financial support that, grounded by large undergraduate programs, allowed for the most cutting-edge research and advanced graduate study ever conducted. As a result, American higher education eventually managed to combine a unique mix of the populist, the practical, and the elite in a single complex system.
The answers to today's problems in higher education are not easy, but as this book shows, they shouldn't be: no single person or institution can determine higher education's future. It is something that faculty, administrators, and students-adapting to society's needs-will determine together, just as they have always done.
A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education
A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education
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Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940191538570 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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