Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403969213 ISBN 13: 9781403969217

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Synopsis

What is actually happening on college campuses in the years between admission and graduation?

Not enough to keep America competitive, and not enough to provide our citizens with fulfilling lives.

When A Nation at Risk called attention to the problems of our public schools in 1983, that landmark report provided a convenient "cover" for higher education, inadvertently implying that all was well on America's campuses.

Declining by Degrees blows higher education's cover. It asks tough--and long overdue--questions about our colleges and universities. In candid, coherent, and ultimately provocative ways, Declining by Degrees reveals:
- how students are being short-changed by lowered academic expectations and standards;
-why many universities focus on research instead of teaching and spend more on recruiting and athletics than on salaries for professors;
-why students are disillusioned;
-how administrations are obsessed with rankings in news magazines rather than the quality of learning;
-why the media ignore the often catastrophic results; and
-how many professors and students have an unspoken "non-aggression pact" when it comes to academic effort.

Declining by Degrees argues persuasively that the multi-billion dollar enterprise of higher education has gone astray. At the same time, these essays offer specific prescriptions for change, warning that our nation is in fact at greater risk if we do nothing.

About this title

About the Author

Richard H. Hersh is a Senior Fellow at the Council for Aid to Education (RAND). He is the former president of Trinity College and Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

John Merrow is the Peabody Award winning president of Learning Matters, Inc. He is Host and Executive Producer of The Merrow Report on PBS and NPR. He is an education correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS. 

Reviews

While it would be easy enough to raise an alarm about the declining quality of higher education in America by trotting out horrifying statistics and disturbing anecdotes, this book thankfully spends little time doing so. Instead, Hersh and Merrow have gathered essays focusing on the root causes of the decline as well as on a range of strategies for reversing it. In this, the varied backgrounds of the contributors, from journalists and policy researchers to university professors and administrators, serves the volume well. These pieces include, among other things, a comparison of how the media covers K-12 as opposed to colleges and universities, considerations of how marketplace models have shaped undergraduate education, and a variety of high-level, philosophical approaches to reimagining the place of higher education in our society. And while all the contributors have distinctive viewpoints on the problem, one thing becomes clear throughout: the state of American higher education is a product less of policy decisions, curriculum structure or student demographics than of the values and priorities of American society. To this end, the contributors do an excellent job sketching the larger cultural and economic forces-such as materialism, job specialization, the information explosion and the near-universal adoption of marketplace values-that they see as primarily responsible for the decline of America's colleges and universities. Because of its broad focus, the book will interest a wide range of readers, from educators and policy makers to parents concerned about their children's education.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1403969213
• ISBN 13: 9781403969217
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Hersh Richard H., Merrow John