The Higher Learning In America

Author : Thorstein Veblen
Publisher : DigiCat
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2022-05-17
Category : Education
ISBN : EAN:8596547008651

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The Higher Learning in America by Thorstein Veblen Pdf

Thorstein Veblen was an American economist and sociologist. He is well known as a witty critic of capitalism. Veblen is famous for the idea of "conspicuous consumption." Conspicuous consumption, along with "conspicuous leisure," is performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. Veblen explains the concept in his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Within the history of economic thought, Veblen is considered the leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology" is still called the Veblenian dichotomy by contemporary economists. In the beginning of his academic career Veblen had difficulties obtaining a university position, whether because he was discriminated for being Norwegian, or openly identified as an agnostic. These difficulties later inspired him to write The Higher Learning in America. In this book he claimed that true academic values were sacrificed by universities in favor of their own self-interest and profitability._x000D_

Author : Robert Maynard Hutchins
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2024-06-30
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781412837187

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The Higher Learning in America by Robert Maynard Hutchins Pdf

Author : John R. Thelin
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press
Page : 555 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2019-04-02
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781421428833

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A History of American Higher Education by John R. Thelin Pdf

Anyone studying the history of this institution in America must read Thelin's classic text, which has distinguished itself as the most wide-ranging and engaging account of the origins and evolution of America's institutions of higher learning.

Author : Derek Bok
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 494 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2015-03-22
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781400866120

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Higher Education in America by Derek Bok Pdf

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.

Author : Derek Curtis Bok
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1986
Category : Education
ISBN : 0674391764

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Higher Learning by Derek Curtis Bok Pdf

Bok concludes that the competition for the best students, the most advanced scholarship, the most successful scientific research, the best facilities--has helped to produce venturesome, adaptable, and varied universities. But because the process of learning itself is imperfectly understood, it is difficult to achieve sustained progress in the quality of education or even to determine which educational innovations actually enhance learning.

Author : Christopher J. Lucas
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1998-03-15
Category : Education
ISBN : 0312176864

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Crisis in the Academy by Christopher J. Lucas Pdf

Not since student turmoil and unrest wreaked havoc on the nation's campuses three decades ago has American higher education been the subject of so much controversy and popular criticism. Countless indictments compete for the public's attention as critics explore vital issues confronting today's institutions of higher learning: curricular fragmentation, declining academic standards, the apparent erosion of liberal learning within academe, widespread neglect of undergraduate education in favour of academic research and unprecedented financial woes. Confusion over fundamental priorities and purposes, the author argues, lies at the heart of the dilemma facing end-of-the-century higher education. Thoughtful and timely, Crisis in the Academy offers a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary higher education while making an important contribution to the ongoing public debate over the future of America's beleaguered and diverse institutions of higher learning.

Author : Charles Dorn
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 478 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2017-06-06
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781501712609

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For the Common Good by Charles Dorn Pdf

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for? In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good? Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

Author : Gary A. Olson,John W. Presley
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2015-12-03
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781317259404

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Future of Higher Education by Gary A. Olson,John W. Presley Pdf

Written by leading education experts and by university presidents, provosts, and other leaders nationally recognized for their innovations, the 22 original and provocative chapters in this new book comprise a wide-ranging examination of the many challenges faced in fashioning the university of tomorrow. Authors offer their research, predictions, concerns, and advice on topics ranging from university finances, student access, changing technologies, and the philosophical underpinnings of college education. They address the multiple challenges facing higher education today, offering ideas and solutions. Contributors include Warren Arbogast, Gretchen Bataille, Lee Benson, Rita Bornstein , Sally Clausen , Reed Way Dasenbrock, John A. Dossey, Jean Dowdall, James L. Fisher, Judy L. Genshaft , Henry A. Giroux, Ira Harkavy , Michael Hoad, Freeman A. Hrabowski, Stephen K. Klasko, James V. Koch, George Mehaffy , J. Hillis Miller, Gary A. Olson , John W. Presley, John Puckett , Michael Rao, Charles B. Reed, Rollin C. Richmond, Roseann Runte, Neil J. Smelser , Sheila M. Stearns, and Randy L. Swing.

Author : Russell Kirk
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1978
Category : Education
ISBN : UOM:39015003483198

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Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning by Russell Kirk Pdf

Author : Iris Saliterer,Paolo Rondo-Brovetto
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2011-05-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9783531931951

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The University as a Business by Iris Saliterer,Paolo Rondo-Brovetto Pdf

Worldwide, universities have recently been the object of large reform processes, facing strong pressure not only from their institutional environment to offer new programs and to adopt new governance and management systems to keep up with the growing competition in the higher education sector but also because of calls for an increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of academic institutions. The authors discuss the introduction of managerial approaches of university governance and the effects on the challenges and threats to treat universities like private for-profit businesses. The book is valuable reading for researchers and managers in the field of university governance.

Author : John M. Ellis
Publisher : Encounter Books
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2021-08-10
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781641772150

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The Breakdown of Higher Education by John M. Ellis Pdf

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.

Author : David F. Labaree
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2017-04-21
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780226250441

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A Perfect Mess by David F. Labaree Pdf

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. This gave them tremendous autonomy to seek out sources of financial support and pursue unconventional opportunities to ensure their success. 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.

Author : Jonathan Zimmerman
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781421439105

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The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman Pdf

The first full-length history of college teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal—scientific, objective, and dispassionate—and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction. American college teaching is in crisis, or so we are told. But we've heard that complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms. Students daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or they meet with a teaching assistant for an hour of aimless discussion. The modern university does not reward teaching, so faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and publication. In the first book-length history of American college teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these perennial complaints. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student. But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately, an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it. Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.

Author : Richard C. Richardson,Mario Martinez
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2009-06-15
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780801891618

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Policy and Performance in American Higher Education by Richard C. Richardson,Mario Martinez Pdf

This book examines how public policy influences institutional performance. Public institutions of higher learning are called upon by state governments to provide educational access and opportunity for students. Paradoxically, the education policies enacted by state legislatures are often complex and costly to implement, which can detract from that mission. The authors evaluate the higher education systems of five states to explain how these policies are developed and how they affect the performance of individual institutions. They identify the rules that are central to the coherence and performance of higher education systems that administrators apply to meet organizational goals within the constraints of changing, sometimes conflicting federal and state policies.

Author : Gary A. Berg
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2016-05-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317103158

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Low-Income Students and the Perpetuation of Inequality by Gary A. Berg Pdf

Drawing upon quantitative data gathered from the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Education, as well as interviews with students from a variety of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, Low-Income Students and the Perpetuation of Inequality examines the question of who really benefits from public higher education. It engages with questions of social capital, opportunity, funding and access to education, presenting a rich discussion of social mobility, the value of college education and the impact of education upon the redistribution of income. A thorough exploration of the real impact of college on American society, this volume will appeal to social scientists with interests in education, social capital, social stratification, class and social mobility.