Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education

by Jon McGee

Overview

How can colleges adapt to disruptive change while staying true to their educational values?

Second Place Winner of the Typographic Jacket from Washington Publishers

The challenges facing colleges and universities today are profound and complex. Fortunately, Jon McGee is an ideal guide through this dynamic marketplace. In Breakpoint, he argues that higher education is in the midst of an extraordinary moment of demographic, economic, and cultural transition that has significant implications for how colleges understand their mission, their market, and their management.

Drawing from an extensive assessment of demographic and economic trends, McGee presents a broad and integrative picture of these changes while stressing the importance of decisive campus leadership. He describes the key forces that influence higher education and provides a framework from which trustees, presidents, administrators, faculty, and policy makers can address pressing issues in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Although McGee avoids endorsing one-size-fits-all solutions, he suggests a number of concrete strategies for handling prospective students and developing pedagogical practices, curricular content and delivery, and management structures. Practical and compelling, Breakpoint will help higher education leaders make choices that advance their institutional values and serve their students and the common good for generations to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421418209
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jon McGee is the vice president for planning and strategy at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. He is the author of Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education. A father of four, he and his wife will have children in college continuously until 2027.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 A Liminal Moment 1

2 A Brief History of [Contemporary] Time 8

3 Demographic Disruption 22

4 Economic Disruption 42

5 Cultural Disruption 64

6 No Line on the Horizon 83

7 Toward a New Marketplace 100

8 Reimagine the Future: Think. Different 107

9 Breakpoint 142

Acknowledgments 145

Notes 149

Index 165

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A helpful, highly readable guide to the landscape of higher education, Breakpoint is effectively informed by Jon McGee's long experience in the field.
—Stephen R. Lewis Jr., Carleton College

Stephen R. Lewis Jr.

A helpful, highly readable guide to the landscape of higher education, Breakpoint is effectively informed by Jon McGee's long experience in the field.

Editorial Reviews

This book is unique; McGee weaves together the demographic, economic, and cultural disruptions to present a cohesive argument that the higher education marketplace has changed forever. Highly recommended.
—Choice

McGee shifts effortlessly between historian—analyzing the events leading up to and following the 2008 recession—and prophet—anticipating the future consequences of contemporary trends.
—Higher Education

Jon McGee provides an intimate perspective on American higher education. He has both an intuitive feel for the pressures caused by continually rising tuition fees, and rational suggestions for positive change, such as the idea that colleges and universities should adapt to “long-predicted demographic shifts, jarring economic change, and changing cultural values about college” (p. 1).
—Higher Education

From the Publisher

McGee shifts effortlessly between historian—analyzing the events leading up to and following the 2008 recession—and prophet—anticipating the future consequences of contemporary trends.

Higher Education

This book is unique; McGee weaves together the demographic, economic, and cultural disruptions to present a cohesive argument that the higher education marketplace has changed forever. Highly recommended.

Choice